


Prey

by weirwitch



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bran Stark Has Emotions, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Tyrion Lannister, Euron Greyjoy is His Own Warning, F/F, F/M, Gen, Jon Snow is Not Called Aegon, M/M, Mad Queen Cersei Lannister, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Nymeria's Wolf Pack, Other, Prophetic Dreams, Ramsay Bolton is His Own Warning, Rhaegar Targaryen Bashing, Rickon Stark Lives, The Grand Northern Conspiracy, The Prophecies Mean Something, The Weirwood Net, Valonqar Prophecy, greensight, the Long Night is actually long
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-27 13:49:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20761367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weirwitch/pseuds/weirwitch
Summary: 𝐌𝐀𝐄𝐑𝐖𝐘𝐍𝐍 𝐏𝐈𝐏𝐄𝐑 has never known evil or cruelty;  like most highborn girls, she is taken by the glamour of songs and stories, and dreams of being swept off her feet by a handsome prince or an honourable knight.After surviving the Red Wedding and becoming ward to House Bolton, Maerwynn is forced to face reality. There are no happy endings, and there is no knight in shining armour on a trusty steed coming to rescue her. In life, the monsters are not griffins and dragons like the songs suggest; they are people, and Ramsay Snow is one of them.To slay this monster, Maerwynn must learn to play a game with rarely any winners.She must learn to play the game of thrones.





	1. The Tourney at the Twins

**Author's Note:**

> The following story will be a blend of both show and book canon, as well as some details that I have come up with on my own. 
> 
> I have been lurking on this website for years, but this is my first time writing and posting a fic of my own. If you have any thoughts while reading, be sure to leave a comment; all feedback is welcome. Thank you for reading! <3

The sun had not yet risen from its bed beneath the clouds, but it was just light enough that Maerwynn could see the towers, rising from the morning fog like a pair of stone phoenixes rising from ash. Her father and his host had set forth a week ago for a tourney at the Twins, and Maerwynn rode among them in her mother’s wheelhouse, nervous with excitement. She had just seen her fifteenth nameday, and this was the first time that she had been deemed old enough to go with her lord father to see the jousters stride down the lists, resplendent and beautiful with their gilded armour and painted lances.

She imagined what the fields would look like when the tents and pavilions were assembled, flooded by a silver sea of armoured knights, with banners of every colour dancing in the late autumn breeze. There would be singers too, and merchants and mummers, and the king himself, Robb Stark, would be there. _It will be just like the songs._ The thought of that made her tummy give a little flutter. She remembered the hearth tales her mother had told her, of gallant princes and chivalrous knights; tossing roses to the lowborn ladies, and crowning the high with wreaths.

_Oh, I hope Ser Edmure will compete._ He was her betrothed, a man of five and twenty, knighted in the eyes of the Seven and true. Just thinking about him made her heart beat a little faster, even though they were not to marry for years and years.

A sudden weight in her lap made her look down. Ruby-red eyes stared back at her, wide and knowing. “We’re almost there,” Maerwynn told Ser Whiskers, reaching down to stroke his dense white fur. 

The rabbit had been ever so anxious since the journey began. Even now he was perched in her lap like a sphinx at vigil, floppy white ears taut and nose twitching in investigation. _‘He mustn’t like the wheelhouse is all,’_ her lady mother had reasoned, but of late Maerwynn wondered if it was more than that. He was only a newborn when she found him— small and hairless, with his mother’s birthing blood still on him— and yet his eyes had been open, red as the leaves of the weirwood tree he lay mewling under. Maester Brandeth had said that was queer; according to his tomes, rabbits were meant to be blind for the first week of their life. Maerwynn thought that made Ser Whiskers special. Sometimes she even wondered if he saw things she could not. 

A hand parted the curtain wall that separated the sitting room of the wheelhouse from the others, and then Maerwynn’s lady mother came stepping through, garbed in a radiant gown of indigo silk trimmed with silver brocade. Her hair was a river of platinum-white ringlets that flowed to the small of her back, pinned out of her face by a band of woven metal wire encrusted with purple stones. 

Maerwynn had been told that she and her mother looked alike for as long as she could remember. They had the same eyes, pale purple and doelike, and the same silver–gold hair and porcelain skin. The blood of old Valyria ran through their veins — the golden blood, her mother had told her. The blood of the dragon.

“Lord Walder is hosting a feast tonight,” said Lady Piper as she reclined on a mound of feather pillows strewn atop the window seat. “Many important lords and ladies will be there.”

“To celebrate the tourney?” Maerwynn asked, frowning. It wasn’t to be held for another fortnight.

“To celebrate the arrival of the king and his host,” her mother corrected, soft and precise.

“King Robb is arriving tonight?” Maerwynn blurted, giddy with excitement. She had never seen the king before (or any king, for that matter), but she had heard tell of his beauty, and his bravery in battle. “Is it true he can turn into a wolf?”

That made her mother laugh. “Oh, my sweet spring girl…” She reached up and fussed at the loose strands of Maerwynn’s long silver hair, tucking them back into place. “... No, I’m afraid our king cannot turn into a wolf.” 

“I’ve heard he can,” Maerwynn argued. “Lewys says so.” Lewys was her older brother. He knew everything.

“Lewys has a mind for stories,” her mother said absently. She was looking out the window of the wheelhouse — they had come to a stop outside the castle walls.

“Have we arrived?” Asked Maerwynn excitedly.

Her mother never answered, for the driver’s son had appeared in the window, a handsome youth named Willem who always smelled of the stables. “M’ladies.” He paused to address them with a stiff little bow. “You will have t’enter on foot — the wheelhouse is too big t’pass through the castle gate.” 

“Thank you, Willem.” Her mother bid him farewell and sent him off with a smile, then she turned her attention to Maerwynn. “Your father’s men will see that our things are brought to our rooms, but first we must go to Lord Walder’s hall to break our fast on meat and mead.” That was the custom for staying anywhere that wasn’t home. Once you had supped on a man’s meat and mead, he wasn’t allowed to hurt you.

A warm rain had fallen the night before, leaving the steps slippery underfoot and the air outside damp and heavy. As Maerwynn and her mother descended from the tall wheelhouse, they used one hand to gather their skirts, and the other to steady each other on their way down. 

Septa Bensfort was waiting at the landing with Alyce, who was still clad in her boots and riding leathers, with her chestnut brown hair drawn out of her face in an intricate braid. She had always been good at braiding, Maerwynn thought admiringly.

Alyce Pemford was the youngest daughter of Lord Poul Pemford, and Maerwynn’s handmaid. At Pinkmaiden, they shared blankets more oft than not, and sang and played games and whispered secrets to each other when the candles were snuffed out. There hadn’t been room for her in the wheelhouse, so she’d had to ride along with the wagons, and camp with the men at nightfall. Maerwynn was sure she preferred that, anyway. Alyce had been mooning over Marq, Maerwynn’s eldest brother, since they were girls, and he had been out riding, too (Maerwynn had begged her mother to let her ride with them— they were at the Trident, where Robert Baratheon slew Prince Rhaegar, and it was rumoured that the rubies from his breastplate still lay in the ford— but Septa Bensfort had told her it wasn’t ladylike, and that had been the end of that).

“Have you seen my lord husband, Alyce?” Asked her mother as they descended the last of the steps.

“He went ahead with Ser Marq to greet Lord Walder, my lady,” Alyce answered politely.

“How discourteous of him,” said Lewys in his usual lazy drawl as he drew up, still ahorse. “Leaving his lady wife and children behind like that. Shame.”

“Speaking of shame,” began Septa Bensfort, her lips prim with disapproval, “what have I said about carrying your rabbit like that, Maerwynn? You’ll tear your dress.”

Ser Whiskers had clambered up onto her shoulder and was now perched there, strong claws dug into the fabric of her ivory gown for balance. “I couldn’t carry him properly,” Maerwynn explained. “I was helping Mother down the steps, and I didn’t want to muddy my skirts.”

The septa gave a sniff of dissatisfaction at her answer. “Gods know why you insist on carrying that rodent everywhere, anyway. A proper young lady would not fuss over such a meager thing — it’s little more than a rat with big ears.”

“Ser Whiskers is my friend,” Maerwynn flared.

“Now, now, you had best listen to your septa, little sister,” Lewys intervened. He reached down to muss her hair, but Maerwynn danced out of reach.

“Mother said that you were lying,” she blurted out, having remembered their conversation in the wheelhouse. “She said you just like telling stories, and that the king can’t really turn into a wolf.”

“_Mother_ has never been on the field of battle to see it done,” Lewys reminded her.

“You hardly have either,” Maerwynn argued. “You’re just a squire.”

“Just a squire?” Lewys drew a hand to his heart in mock offence. “You wound me, sweet sister.”

“That is enough,” their mother said. Her tone was serious, but there was a fond smile on her face. “We had best get going now, elsewise Lord Walder will think us rude. Your father and brother are already inside supping with him.”

A gangly steward with a pimple nestled in the fold beside his nose showed them to the great hall, and after that they joined the rest of their household at a long table below the dais. It was a modest hall— nothing like the one at Pinkmaiden, with its stained glass windows and mosaic flooring— but it was spacious enough, and on each pilaster hung a torched iron sconce to illuminate the room in flickering golden light.

Walder Frey sat in the highest seat in the hall, as was his due as the Lord of the Crossing. He was crookbacked and hideous, with a fringe of greasy grey hair around a balding, mottled scalp. _He must be older than the history books,_ Maerwynn thought, staring as he sipped from his goblet with a shaking hand. _Likely has more dust on him as well._

“Welcome, welcome,” Lord Walder acknowledged Maerwynn and her family in a gruff, monotonous voice. “I see you have a daughter now, Clement. How old are you, girl?”

“Fifteen, my lord,” she said politely.

Maerwynn did not like the smile that crept onto Lord Walder’s face at her answer, nor the hungry way he looked at her, like a slice of meat sizzling on a firestone. “Come forward, Esmae, let me observe the courtesies,” he said, motioning for her mother to join him on the dais. “You too, girl, I’d like a closer look at you, heh. Old eyes.”

Maerwynn handed Ser Whiskers off to Alyce before following her lady mother up the creaky wooden steps to the dais. “Just as beautiful as you were ten years ago...” Lord Walder was saying. He took her mother’s hand and kissed it. “... I see why Clement didn’t need eight wives. Heh.” Her mother returned to their family’s table, and Maerwynn found herself alone on the dais.

Lord Walder licked his lips. “Sixteen, you say?” He asked, his watery eyes roaming over her.

“Fifteen, my lord,” Maerwynn corrected.

Walder Frey waved a dismissive hand. “It’s all the same when you’re of my age, heh. I’m almost ninety, you know.” Maerwynn could tell. “Come closer, girl... Yes, that’s good. Give me your hand.” She did, and he planted a wet kiss atop her knuckle.

Maerwynn was vastly relieved to be rid of him. It took all of her will to stop herself from rubbing her hand off on her skirts right then and there, but she waited until she had sat down with her family, then did it subtly beneath the table like a lady.

“I don’t like the way he looked at her,” her brother Marq was saying. He was seven and ten, a man grown, well over six foot tall and muscled like an ox. All the serving girls at Pinkmaiden swooned over him, and Maerwynn understood why; he was highborn and beautiful, heir to the castle, and his recent knighthood had only made him all the more becoming.

Lewys snorted with laughter. “It’s Walder Frey. How else do you expect him to look at her? The man is utterly perverse — he’s old as the realm itself, and yet he still takes maidens to bed each night.”

Septa Bensfort was horror–struck. “Save the rude discussions for the courtyard, not the breakfast table — and not while your sister is present, either!”

“It’s alright, Septa,” said Maerwynn’s father, smiling. “The boys did not wish to offend. They’re protective of their sister.” Lord Piper of Pinkmaiden was five and thirty, strong of jaw and thick of shoulder, with dark, brassy blond hair that fell past his chin. His closely–trimmed beard was shot with white, making him look older than his years, but for all that he was handsome, with deep blue eyes that twinkled when he smiled.

Alyce leaned over to whisper in her ear. “What did Lord Walder say to you up there?”

“Nothing, really,” Maerwynn told her, “but he planted a great wet kiss upon my hand. Here, have a taste.” Before Alyce could react, Maerwynn reached over and rubbed her knuckles on her lips; the ones that Lord Walder had kissed.

Alyce shrieked and slipped sideways off the bench. Septa Bensfort came lurching to her feet in an instant, red in the face, and her saggy jowls, too. “Noble ladies do _not_ grapple with each other at the table,” she squawked, her voice rising higher and higher with each word she said. “I want you two shown to your chambers, at once!”

“But we were only playing.” Tears welled in Maerwynn’s eyes. “It’s not fair.”

_“At once!”_

And so it was. “I hate Septa Bensfort,” Maerwynn proclaimed after one of Lord Walder’s equally hideous sons had shown her and Alyce to their chambers. “I can’t wait until Edmure and I are married, then I’ll never have to see her ugly fat face again.” Angry tears slid down her cheeks, hot on her skin. Alyce sat her down on the edge of the bed and dabbed at them with a washcloth, while Ser Whiskers lunged up at her face, licking with his warm tongue.

“You mustn’t cry, my lady, else your eyes will be red and puffy at the feast,” she chided gently.

“Let them be,” Maerwynn grumbled, though she stopped her crying after that. King Robb was going to be there tonight; it was important she look her best.

“Do you hear that?” Alyce asked suddenly. She’d stopped her dabbing with the washcloth, and a crease had appeared between her brows.

Maerwynn heard it. Somewhere outside there was a steady thunder of hooves, then the rumble of the heavy iron portcullis as it opened. She jumped up at once. “It must be the king,” she exclaimed, standing on the tips of her toes, trying to catch a glimpse of the world beyond the small, round window of her chambers.

“Try this, my lady.” Alyce had dragged over a stool. Maerwynn clambered onto it and nearly slipped off in her eagerness.

It was not the king. Even from a distance, the banner of House Tully was unmistakable: a leaping trout, silver against a rippling blue–and–red field. There were wagons towing men–at–arms, a baggage train and knights ahorse, and at the head of it all was her Edmure, resplendent in a red and blue doublet, young and dark and handsome. “It’s him,” Maerwynn gushed, dizzy with excitement. “It’s him, it’s my betrothed; he’s come for the feast, and the tournament, too!” In an instant, her troubles were absolved.

“Find some serving girls and have them prepare me a bath,” she told Alyce as she stepped down from the stool. “I’ll need fragrant oils and soaps, and oh, petals from the garden outside, I think I spotted lavender on our way in.” She had to be beautiful, it was more important than anything.

Alyce did as she was bade, and in twenty minutes she returned with everything Maerwynn had asked for. Two serving girls trailed behind her like the mice to Ser Petyr the Piper’s flute, towing buckets of water so hot they steamed. They dumped them into a tub in the corner of the room before scurrying out, quick as they had come.

Maerwynn let Alyce pull her shift over her head before climbing into the big wooden tub. She was tempted to ask for a cup of wine to calm her nerves, but she knew her lord father wouldn’t allow it; he only ever let her have wine at feasts, and even then that was just a few sips from his own goblet. _Marq is allowed to have his own glass,_ she thought with dull resentment. _Marq is allowed to do most everything._

Maerwynn did not quite know why the rules were so different for boys, but they just were. It had been especially difficult to understand growing up, watching from the castle window as her brothers played at swords in the courtyard, while she was forced to balance books on her head and hold a curtsy until her toes wanted to fall off.

It was not all bad, though. Maerwynn liked singing enough, and poetry and needlework, too, she only wished that she could enjoy those things _and_ become a healer, like the legendary Melessa the Merciful, a noblewoman from the Age of Heroes whose healing abilities had become known all throughout the Seven Kingdoms. It was said that she could heal mortal wounds with a kiss, and bring a man back from death with a song.

Maerwynn couldn’t do any of those things, but she _had_ nursed Ser Whiskers back to health after she’d found him, and she’d done a fine enough job at that. _Or not,_ she thought glumly, remembering how Septa Bensfort had reacted when she’d told her she wanted to become a healer for the first time. _“That isn’t a job befitting a lady of your status,”_ she’d said in that warbly voice she had. _“Now tie off those threads and start again. Your stitches are crooked!”_

It wasn’t fair, but then it never was. Marq was allowed to play the part of both a nobleman and a knight — was it so far–fetched for her to want to be a healer and a lady?

Maerwynn’s skin was flushed and pink when she finally climbed from the tub. Alyce laid her down to wax and oil her body, and afterwards Maerwynn was misted in a perfume made from ground vanilla beans and coconut water. When that was done, the serving girls that had prepared her bath returned to trim her nails and brush her hair, and then she and Alyce were left alone once more.

“I should think an updo will suit your gown,” Alyce mused. She swept behind her, and the tug of war at Maerwynn’s hair began.

“Which one will I be wearing?” Maerwynn winced as Alyce’s deft fingers worked at a snarl the serving girls had missed. “The lilac silk?”

Alyce did not answer, but she gave a little giggle, as though she knew some secret jest that only she were privy to. After that it was silent, save for the sound of Ser Whiskers’ soft snores.

“Do you think there will be music?” Maerwynn asked suddenly. “Oh, what am I saying, _of course_ there will be music. Do you think Ser Edmure will ask me to dance? What if I stumble or step on his toes?”

“You _won’t_,” Alyce said patiently.

Maerwynn supposed she was right. It was just a silly feast; the tourney was what she _really_ ought to worry about. “Do you think if he wins, he’ll name me his queen of love and beauty?” Asking that reminded her of something else. “Oh, I should embroider him my sigil to wear on his belt; he’ll want to carry my favour, I’m sure of it.” She hugged herself tightly, hoping she would have enough time to sew him something nice.

“Keep still,” Alyce chided. “It is almost done.”

Maerwynn tried, but a deep restlessness was upon her, and it was all she could do not to rock in her seat. She hadn’t even realized that she was picking at her fingernails until Alyce gave her arm a swat, and after that she had to sit on her hands to stop herself from doing any more damage than she had already.

It felt as though an eternity had passed before Alyce finally stepped in front of her, linen skirts swirling. “It is finished, my lady.” She handed her an ornate silvered looking glass; one of the necessities Maerwynn had brought with her from Pinkmaiden. “You may look, if it please you.”

Look Maerwynn did. Her hair was braided around her head in a silver–gold crown, with white baby’s breath flowers poking through the plaits. She looked half a queen, and the magic of the day was beginning to make her feel like one, too.

“Do you like it, my lady?” Alyce was staring down at her anxiously, waiting for a response. “Do tell. It is not too late to change it if you are displeased.”

Maerwynn leapt up from her seat and threw her arms around her handmaid. “It is beautiful. You did a wonderful job, as you always do.”

When she pulled away, Alyce was smiling. It looked as though she was about to say something when a knock came at the door behind them, loud and unexpected. Maerwynn turned, frowning. “What is it?”

Her mother’s voice came through the door. “It is almost time for the feast. I’ve come to bring you your new gown.”

Maerwynn’s heart gave a dizzying leap. A new gown? She thought, as excited as she was astonished. “Come in, Mother, Alyce has just finished my hair.”

Lady Piper slipped inside with a linen garment bag in her arms.

Alyce bit her lip. “Would you like to speak in private, my lady?”

“Please, Alyce, if you would be so kind.”

Alyce bowed her head and left through the door Maerwynn’s mother had entered.

“Why did you make Alyce leave?” Maerwynn wondered aloud. “I’d have liked her to see me in the new dress.”

“She can see you afterwards,” her mother assured her. “There is a matter I must discuss with you first — a matter of importance.” She sat her down on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her leg, just above the knee. “I have been dishonest with you, my love. We have not come to the Twins for a tournament... We have come for a wedding.”

Maerwynn’s tongue turned to lead in her mouth. “Whose wedding?” She willed herself to ask.

Lady Piper hesitated before she answered. “Edmure Tully’s.”

Maerwynn found herself too stunned for words.

“I am so sorry, my sweet,” her mother went on gently. “Lord Walder would not let the king and his host pass the Green Fork without this. Lord Edmure had no other choice.”

Finally Maerwynn found her voice. “He had a choice, and he’s made it,” she shouted, forgetting herself in her grief. “Lord Edmure is mine by oath, and I his. If you would only let me speak to Lord Walder then I could explain everything, and perhaps he’d let King Robb pass without all of this nonsense. Once he knows that Edmure has already been promised to another—”

“It is too late. The wedding ceremony has just ended.” Her mother reached up to brush a tear that Maerwynn hadn’t even realized was rolling down her cheek.

“It isn’t fair,” Maerwynn cried, wrenching away from her mother’s hand. “I was going to be _Lady of Riverrun_ one day — the wife to the liege lord of the Riverlands! Now I am going to be lady of nothing, and the wife to no one.” Her life was over before it had begun.

“Now, now, my sweet girl,” her mother said tenderly. “You know that is not true. Lord Edmure is not the only man in Westeros.”

He wasn’t, but he was the only man Maerwynn wanted. Their fathers fought next to one another at the Battle of the Trident and the Battle of the Bells, and they were as close as brothers. Maerwynn’s wedding to Edmure would have finally united their houses by blood, and besides all that, she’d have been Lady of _Riverrun_ — the most powerful woman in the Riverlands.

“Do you know how I met your father?” Her mother asked suddenly.

Maerwynn had never thought to ask. She knew that her mother was from Volantis and of high birth, but apart from that, she’d just assumed that their marriage had been arranged, as marriages between lords and ladies often were. “... No,” she said quietly, after a silence. “How did you?”

“As you know, my father is Doniphos Paenymion, one of the current ruling triarchs in the Free City of Volantis,” her mother began. “My siblings and I lived in the lap of luxury. Home for us was a beautiful white palace overlooking the Summer Sea — the biggest property in the city. We had more jewels and riches than you could fit in Lord Walder’s great hall, and each night we supped on six–course meals consisting of the finest foods coin could buy: truffle, lamprey, and caviar, pigeon pie and lobster, washed down with as much Arbor gold as we could stomach.”

“So why did you leave?” Maerwynn blurted out.

Her mother smiled at the interruption, even though it wasn’t ladylike. “I was to wed a magister in Pentos, a title used by merchant–lords in the Free Cities.” Maerwynn realized that her smile had not been a happy one. There were tears shining in her mother’s eyes, making them sparkle like a pair of polished amethysts; sad and beautiful. “I was only sixteen, and he was a cruel old man whose riches came from running pleasure houses occupied by slaves. I could not marry him — _would not_ marry him. That was when I met your father.”

“Why was Father in Essos?” Maerwynn asked, interrupting her mother for the second time.

“As you know, House Piper has cultivated silkworms for generations,” Lady Piper answered patiently.

Of course Maerwynn knew. It was where the sigil of their house came from: a pink maiden dancing in a swirl of silk.

“Your father travelled to Volantis hoping to negotiate a trade deal with the ruling triarchs,” continued her mother. “He made such an impression on them that after the contract was signed, they held a magnificent feast in his name, complete with singers and mummers and dancing bears. He made me laugh more than I ever had, and the others, too. The Piper charm, they called it.” Maerwynn thought of Lewys. Jests had always come easier to him, too. “I had fallen in love with him by the end of the night, and he with me. I begged my father to let me marry him, but he was determined to wed me to the old magister — he’d promised me as payment for some dragon egg from Asshai. I refused to be a bargaining chip, so once the hour of the wolf had come, I crept out of bed and stole every treasure that he held dear, including the dragon egg he had just bought, and two Valyrian steel weapons: one a dagger, and the other a greatsword that had been in our family since the Doom.”

“Legacy,” Maerwynn murmured. That was her father’s greatsword, or at least it was now.

“Yes, Legacy,” her mother confirmed. “After grabbing what I could, I boarded your father’s ship and we set sail for Westeros. I have never looked back since, and my own father never came after me.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” Maerwynn asked. Her own betrothal had just been set to ruin — it was hardly an appropriate time for a love story.

“Because that is what I want for you.” Her mother laid a warm hand on her cheek. “I want you to wed a man, not his titles. And Lord Edmure is not that man.”

A soft knock came upon the door behind them. “The feast will commence in ten minutes’ time,” Alyce told them from the other side. “Lord Walder is summoning the guests now.”

“Thank you, Alyce, we shan’t be long,” Lady Piper replied.

Maerwynn felt the beginnings of panic seize the back of her throat. She was going to have to sit in Lord Walder’s hall, and watch and pretend to be happy as Edmure laughed and danced and ate with his new bride. She could not think of a fate worse than that. Surely she was the most unlucky maid that had ever lived.

“I don’t want to go,” she decided all at once. “Please, Mother, don’t make me. I’ll stay in my chambers with Alyce, and if Father asks where I am, you can tell him I caught a chill on the journey here.”

Her mother just smiled a strange, sad sort of smile that told Maerwynn there was no begging her way out of this. “Tell me our words, sweet girl.”

“... Brave and beautiful,” Maerwynn said uncertainly.

Her mother nodded. “You are already beautiful, but can you be brave?”

She managed a little nod.

“There will be many high lords at tonight’s feast,” her mother went on, “many of whom are young and unmarried. It would be good for you to attend; you may meet someone there.”

Maerwynn didn’t want to meet someone there. “This is nothing like the songs,” she said sulkily.

At that, her mother laughed. “Life is not a song, my sweet girl. The sooner you realize that, the better off you will be.”


	2. The Bear and the Maiden Fair

It ought to have been the food Maerwynn worried about, not Ser Edmure or Roslin Frey.

The wedding feast began with a chewy squirrel stew, followed by a salad of green beans, onions, and beets, and mounds of mashed turnips that were cold long before they reached the table. And those were only the appetizers. The main courses consisted of river pike turned slimy from the aged almond milk that they had been poached in, jellied calves' brains, and a leche of stringy beef that stuck between Maerwynn's teeth with every bite.

Not that she had been hungry _before_ the food was served. At the table on the dais, Edmure and Roslin were the soul of every love song, sharing laughter and secrets and kisses, and a single plate and a single cup once the feast had begun. It hurt Maerwynn's heart ever so much to watch, and it didn't help that Roslin was beautiful. Her hair was a long tumble of curling brown waves, and she was garbed in a magnificent silver–grey dress that woke the blue in her eyes and put Maerwynn's new gown to shame. _It would be easier if she were ugly. Why couldn't she have been ugly?_ It was a nasty thought in truth, and Maerwynn was ashamed that she had let it spring to her mind, but it was hard not to envy Roslin when she was living the day Maerwynn had dreamed of since she was a little girl.

The table arrangements were just as unfortunate as everything else. She and her family had been seated with her father's older sister, Alerie, who her mother had always misliked. Maerwynn could scarcely blame her. Lady Alerie was an unpleasant woman even on a good day, greedy and vain, with no lack of cunning. Maerwynn could never quite tell if she was praising or insulting her. Her husband was Lord Jonos Bracken of Stone Hedge— a stocky man who was prone to blustering when provoked, but amicable otherwise— and their only offspring was a fat, loud girl named Megga, who had inherited all of her mother's nastiness and none of her tact.

Before Alyce had arrived at Pinkmaiden, Megga was the only girl Maerwynn knew. She was entirely unsatisfactory as friends went, if she could even be called one. She used to tell Maerwynn she looked like an ugly old hag with her long silver hair, and tug it whenever she walked by, so hard it made her yelp. Maerwynn hated her and her round smirking face, but she was wise enough not to retaliate... At least, not when her parents or her septa were looking.

"How have you been, my lady?" Asked her uncle from the bench across. He was still chewing his serving of pickled pike, and when he spoke Maerwynn's direction, the smell hit her like a ton of bricks. "Still looking to become a healer?"

"Of course she is," her father answered in her place. "She's been nursing animals for practice, too. She even brought one to the table."

Maerwynn blushed guiltily. "Have not," she protested, hands rushing to cover the sack slung across her side. Marq and Lewys laughed.

"You brought that vermin to the dinner table?" Septa Bensfort shrieked. "At a wedding feast with the king present, of all places... You had best keep that thing under control, young lady. Do you hear me?"

_Yes, unfortunately,_ Maerwynn was tempted to say. Instead, she dug her nails into her palms and said, "yes, septa," through gritted teeth.

"You seem rather quiet this evening," Lord Jonos commented. "Are you well, my lady?"

Megga was smirking in that stupid way she had. "Don't you know, Father? Ser Edmure and Lady Maerwynn were _betrothed._ You shan't speak on it — I'm sure the matter still pains her so." She jutted her lower lip into a scornful little pout that made Maerwynn want to get up and slap her.

Across the table, her uncle was blurting out an awkward apology.

"It is quite alright," said Maerwynn's lady mother, calm and dignified. "A new betrothal of equal prestige has already been arranged. My daughter has no room for want."

That was a lie, but watching the smirk slide off Megga's face was worth the sin.

"With whom?" Asked Alerie. She was tracing the brim of her goblet with a long, claw–like finger, and had a look in her eye that suggested she was listening the whole time, but had been waiting for the right moment to pounce.

It was Maerwynn's father who answered this time. "I am touched by your concern for my daughter's marriage contracts, sister, but in light of what has transpired, we decided it best to keep things private until vows are exchanged."

Alerie looked mildly amused. "The girl has just seen her fifteenth name day, Clement. Surely that is old enough for marriage. She should be wed on the morrow."

Maerwynn found herself possessed by a sudden boldness. "You surprise me, Aunt Alerie. I had presumed you were of the belief that marriage is timeless — after all, Megga is eighteen and unwed." Fortunately, the musicians began to play before her aunt could think up a clever response.

As was expected, Edmure and Roslin led the dance. If Maerwynn had thought her gown looked magnificent when she was sitting up on the dais, then Roslin looked half a goddess now: her long silken skirts swirled gracefully with each spin and step, and the gemstones sewn into her bodice glew brilliantly from the light of the candles burning around them. The sight of it all made Maerwynn's eyes fill with mortified tears, and the hundred candles in the hall transformed to a thousand.

Marq laid a hand on her own, warm and comforting. "The guests are to join in soon. Would you honour me with a dance, sister?"

Maerwynn sniffled. "I suppose."

Her dance with Marq passed as if in a dream, and soon the music was spinning them apart. It was Smalljon Umber opposite her afterwards, clumsy–footed and sweaty, then Lord Roose Bolton, who danced with smooth unsmiling grace and said but nothing. Next was Ser Jared Frey, whose face was mottled with grotesque pimples, but for all that Maerwynn was grateful, as she was sure anything was better than Lord Bolton's cold, unwelcoming arms.

Patrek Mallister gave her his condolences and told her she looked every inch as beautiful as Lady Roslin, and when Maerwynn was partnered with Jinglebell, the fool of the Twins, he swung his head to the beat of the drums to make the bells on his cap rattle along with them. Then the dance brought her face–to–face with King Robb.

Maerwynn had never seen anyone half so beautiful. Robb Stark was a tall youth of seven and ten, with a head of thick, curling auburn hair, and blue eyes that seemed to smile even when he wasn't. The doublet he wore was fashioned from a pale grey velvet, the colour of House Stark, and suspended from his shoulders with a pair of wolf's head pins hung a long, flowing cape that served to compliment his every movement. His crown was a bronze circlet engraved in ancient runes— the language of the First Men, Maerwynn realized— and it was decorated with half a dozen iron spikes, all shaped like longswords.

The king danced as beautifully as he looked. "I owe you an apology, my lady," he said when the dance brought her into his strong arms. "My lady mother has informed me that you were meant to wed my uncle. I never meant to cheat you out of a betrothal."

"Your kindness is much appreciated, but there is no need for an apology, your grace," Maerwynn said, anxious to please.

Robb smiled. _He has the warmest smile._ "Thank you, my lady, you are... Pray forgive me, but what is that?" He was looking down.

Maerwynn followed his gaze. Sticking out of the sack hanging at her hip were Ser Whisker's long white ears, taut as a drawn bow. Horrified, she drew her arms away from Robb and tried to shove the ears back down, but it only served to make things worse — Ser Whiskers dug his claws into her sleeve and began clambering along her arm, all the way up, until he had reached her shoulder.

Even Robb's laughter was beautiful, so warm and inviting that it made Maerwynn join in despite her embarrassment. "Who is this little fellow?" He asked, reaching to ruffle Ser Whisker's dense white fur. "And why was he in a bag? Were you meaning to give him to the kitchens? Don't lie to me, it is a great crime to lie to a king."

Maerwynn's mouth dropped open. "No, he's mine, I..." She supposed there was no sense in lying to him now. "... I wasn't supposed to bring him." Her face was as warm as a flame, and she just knew she was blushing.

Robb gave another hearty chuckle. "I suspect 'he' has a name?"

"Ser Whiskers," she said quietly. It sounded silly when she was saying it to a king.

That made him smile a strange, vacant smile. "You remind me of my sister, Arya," he told her as she returned Ser Whiskers to the pouch. There was sadness in his voice. "Though she's younger than you, I suppose... Or she would have been." The music was spinning them apart before Maerwynn could ask what he'd meant.

She danced with six more men after that, all of whom were unwed, but none of whom were suitable husbands. Maerwynn wanted to hate her parents for bringing her here. _"There will be many high lords at tonight's feast, many young and unmarried,"_ she recalled her mother saying as one such man stepped on her toes. _"It would be good for you to attend. You may meet someone there."_ Everyone she'd met she wished she hadn't— with the exception of the king, who was already wed to Cerena Lannister of Casterly Rock— and worse still, her fat cousin Megga was there to smirk at her every misfortune.

It wasn't fair. All Maerwynn wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs. _Why couldn't I have flowered sooner?_ She would have been married to her Edmure already, and now that Lord Hoster was dead, she'd have been Lady of Riverrun, too. The day she and her family had set off for the Twins, Maerwynn was the happiest she'd ever been, giddy with glamour, off to see the splendour of King Robb's tournament. _I was stupid to believe it,_ she thought. _Just a stupid little girl with a head full of songs and stories._

When the dance was over, Maerwynn all but collapsed into her seat on the bench, tired and hungry and miserable. "How did it go?" Alyce asked, pale hands reaching up to tuck the loose strands of Maerwynn's hair back into the plait around her head.

"Lord Willem Manderly stepped on my toes," she complained, "and Smalljon Umber smelled as though he'd just returned from battle."

Alyce gaped at her. "You are truly wicked, my lady! You know what I meant to ask..." She lowered her voice to a whisper. _"Dancing with the king!"_

Maerwynn had almost forgotten about that. "He told me I remind him of his sister," she said, loud enough for Megga to hear. It was high praise to be compared to a princess.

Alyce exclaimed over the news admiringly, but Megga was smirking. "I've met both his sisters," she said, "at the Hand's Tourney in King's Landing. Did he mention which one, perchance?"

"Arya," Maerwynn told her, wondering why it mattered. A princess was a princess.

Megga just threw her head back and laughed.

"I couldn't help but notice Ser Whiskers made an appearance during the dance," Lewys said slyly.

Maerwynn shot a quick glance at Septa Bensfort to ensure she hadn't heard, then turned back to her brother. "You be quiet, stupid. Ser Whiskers is ever so well-behaved — he just doesn't like being cooped up." As she said that, he sprung forth from the bag and went scrambling four-legged onto the table. Maerwynn's uncle Jonos made to catch him and missed, Megga shrieked as he flew past her, nearly slipping off the bench in her fright, and Septa Bensfort was squawking as she had never squawked before.

The chaos was set to rights when Lewys dove onto the table and caught him before he could make off. "Victory is mine," he cried, dangling Ser Whiskers mid-air by the scruff of his neck. "It appears as though your little friend is not so well-behaved as you thought, sister."

Maerwynn stuck her tongue out at him and went _"thbppt"._

_"Enough!"_ Septa Bensfort was shouting. "In all my days, I have never witnessed such disrespectful, humiliating behaviour, and at a feast with the _royal family_ present of all places! Why, if you had been _my_ children, I'd have each and every one of your bottoms flogged..."

Maerwynn's father smiled at her; the small, secret smile he reserved just for her. "Go on, sweetling, put your rabbit away."

Septa Bensfort gaped at him. "I mean no offence, my lord, but surely such behaviour should be punished—"

"We're fortunate the guests are far too loud and far too drunk to notice," Lord Clement interrupted. "It is a splendid night. I see no reason to ruin it by doling out punishments."

Septa Bensfort dipped her head in submission, but a doubtful look remained cast over her wrinkled face.

The first dessert course of the evening was promising: fresh blood orange tarts drenched in a zesty grapefruit drizzle, with a side of candied walnuts. Maerwynn made a point of eating with her fingers, much to Septa Bensfort's mute horror, and even went so far as to lick the plate when she was done. It felt like vengeance for being sent to her room that morning, and that was almost sweeter than the tart.

"They say she and Lady Lyanna look as much alike as reflections in a mirror," Lewys said suddenly. Maerwynn followed her brother's gaze. He was looking at the princess, Vanya Stark, tall and fair, with her long brown hair and haunting grey eyes.

Maerwynn knew who Lady Lyanna was — she had only heard the story half a hundred times. Prince Rhaegar carried her off and raped her, and Robert, her true love, fought a war to win her back. He slew Rhaegar on the Trident with his hammer, but he was too late; Rhaegar killed her, and Robert never got her back at all.

"But that's not all they say," Lewys went on. "According to one tale, Lord Eddard was so distraught after his sister's death that he used the dark magics of the First Men to bring her back, and she was born again through Princess Vanya."

"Liar," Maerwynn said. "Once someone's dead, you can't bring them back. Everyone knows that."

Lewys gave a doubtful shrug. "Who is to say it isn't possible when magic is involved? And some say love is the most powerful magic of all..."

Maerwynn looked at Princess Vanya wonderingly, as though if she stared long enough, the mystery would uncover itself. Vanya must have felt her gaze upon her, for she looked up from her plate, met her eyes, and smiled. Maerwynn felt a warmth spread through her cheeks. Suddenly she wished she was invisible.

Lewys nudged her as she was busying her hands serving herself seconds of the blood orange tart. "Look. That one there, between Lady Catelyn and Lord Walder — that's Roose Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort."

Maerwynn frowned. "I know who he is. I was partnered with him during the dance." Recalling that made her shudder. "Is his hold truly called the Dreadfort? Why such a grim name?"

"Fitting, for such a grim family," said Lewys with a smirk. "The Boltons have skinned their enemies living for centuries, and enjoy doing it so much that they had it immortalized in their sigil: a flayed man, hung upside down on a saltire cross. Their house words are, 'a naked man has few secrets, but a flayed man has none'."

"Their house words are, 'our blades are sharp,' actually," Marq interrupted. "Now quit scaring her. The Starks banned that vile practice thousands of years ago when King Rogar Bolton bent the knee."

Lewys waited until Marq had turned away to speak again. "Even though King Rogar publicly forswore his right to flay his enemies, rumour has it that he continued to do it in secret, and his descendants after him," he said, his voice a whisper. Maerwynn leaned forward to listen. "The Smalljon says they have a hidden chamber in the Dreadfort to display the skins — he's seen it, to be sure. Some say they wear them as cloaks, and others say they use them to transform into the dead. Shapechanging, the Northerners call it."

"Lies, I call it." Marq hit him in the mouth with the back of his hand. "Now be quiet. You're frightening her."

Lewys peered down at her in amusement. "You're not frightened, are you, sister?"

She put on a brave face and shook her head.

Marq saw through her mummer's farce at once. "Of course she is. Now stop, or the next time I hit you, you won't be awake to say anything else."

This time Lewys listened.

The rest of the feast was less eventful by large. Trays of pies, fruit custards, and candied vegetables came and went, and their cups were kept full by the servants all night. Naturally, Maerwynn and Alyce were only permitted water, while Marq and Lewys drank as much mead as they liked (though she caught Marq sneaking Alyce sips from his goblet more than once).

As the bedding ceremony crept closer and closer, Maerwynn could not help herself from stealing glances up at the dais. _She isn't even smiling,_ she thought bitterly. Lady Roslin's face was pale as milk, and her eyes wide and teary. _If that were me,_ I _would be smiling._ The bedding ceremony had always seemed so wonderfully wicked and exciting to her, not to mention what would happen afterwards. What was there to be upset about?

There wasn't time to speculate. The musicians had taken to playing a song so loud Maerwynn could feel the beat of the drums in her heart, and all of the guests were singing along.

_"A BEAR, THERE WAS! A BEAR, A BEAR! ALL BLACK AND BROWN AND COVERED IN HAIR!"_

At once, half the men and women in the hall were up out of their seats, singing and laughing and dancing as they made their way to the dais. Lewys could not have been quicker to join them, and nearly knocked over his goblet in his eagerness.

_"HOW SWEET SHE WAS, AND PURE AND FAIR! THE MAID WITH HONEY UP IN HER HAIR!"_

Maerwynn watched as the crowd descended upon the bride and groom. Hands groped for buttons, fabric, pins, and anything else they could get a good grip on, pulling and ripping and twisting until clothes came undone.

_"OH, I'M A MAID, AND I'M PURE AND FAIR! I'LL NEVER DANCE WITH A HAIRY BEAR!"_

Edmure was laughing and singing as best he could, but beside him, there was a steady stream of tears rushing down Roslin's cheeks. Lewys took her in his arms and spun her around, but even that did nothing to quell her crying.

_"I CALLED FOR A KNIGHT BUT YOU'RE A BEAR! ALL BLACK AND BROWN AND COVERED IN HAIR!"_

"I hear Tully men have trout between their legs instead of cocks!" Alyx Frey shouted as she worked at the ties of Edmure's breeches. The hall erupted in laughter.

_"SHE KICKED AND WAILED, THE MAID SO FAIR, BUT HE LICKED THE HONEY FROM HER HAIR! HER HAIR, HER HAIR! HE LICKED THE HONEY FROM HER HAIR!"_

The Smalljon took Roslin from Lewys' arms, as easily as though she were a child. "I hear Frey women have _two_ gates in place of one," he said, and he lifted her by the waist and peered up her skirts, as if to check. There was more laughter then, and cheers too. For a moment, Roslin began to laugh with them, but her smile just as quickly turned to a sob. She was fortunate that no one seemed to notice; the hall had gone up in the general cry of "bed them, bed them," and they were all too busy pulling at her clothes to spot the tears sliding down her cheeks.

_"THEN SHE SIGHED AND SQUEALED AND KICKED THE AIR! 'MY BEAR,' SHE SANG, 'MY BEAR SO FAIR!' AND OFF THEY WENT FROM HERE TO THERE! THE BEAR, THE BEAR, THE BEAR AND THE MAIDEN FAIR!"_

The singing followed Edmure and Roslin out of the hall. Lewys went with them, among the usual herd of curious youths that leaned against the bridal suite door after the bedding ceremony. Maerwynn knew she ought to join the throng of women round Edmure, but she would only cry and ruin their fun. The _last_ thing she felt now was bawdy.

She waited until the doors had closed behind the bride and groom to speak. "Why did the maid have honey in her hair?" It sounded a rather terrible sticky mess, nevermind that a bear was licking at it.

Her family's table erupted in laughter.

"Never you mind that ribald song, my lady," said Septa Bensfort, whose feathers were all aruffle. "Such lyrics are not appropriate for a lady's ears."

Maerwynn looked to Alyce, wondering if she knew what it meant, but her eyes were on Marq.

Another song began to play then, this one a somber, wordless melody that made the whole of the hall fall silent. Marq's periwinkle blue eyes narrowed. He turned to Father, who was frowning, and a silent look passed between them.

"Is something amiss?" Maerwynn asked, anxious to know what was going on.

Her father ignored her. "Take Maerwynn and Alyce on up to their chambers," he told Septa Bensfort. "It is time for bed. You go too, Esmae."

"But the after-bedding festivities have only just begun," Maerwynn protested. She had been looking forward to the drinking games all night. Even if she were sober, she could still play 'I have never' with her fingers instead of a cup, and she and Alyce had substituted the drink in 'drink or dare' for answering questions many a time. "Surely I can stay just a little while longer?"

"Obey your father's orders, child," said Septa Bensfort, and for what seemed like the first time, her voice didn't sound so condescending. "Now up off the bench, that's a good little lady."

"It isn't fair," Maerwynn complained to Alyce as her mother and Septa Bensfort led them to the door. "Lewys is allowed to stay and he's only a _year_ older than me. Father never lets me do anything because I'm a girl." She could hear Megga's snickers behind her, distant and cruel. _How I hate her. I hope she never marries._

A man stepped in front of them before they could exit the hall, closing the tall wooden doors and barring them shut. "What is the meaning of this, ser?" Maerwynn's lady mother demanded.

"Lord Walder's orders," the man said unapologetically.

Her mother was undeterred. "It is past time my daughter goes to bed. I need to pass."

He smirked grimly. "The king is about to receive his wedding gift. You'll be wanting to stay."

Lady Catelyn Stark was there then, all auburn hair and high cheekbones and blue eyes. She seized the Frey by the arm, and at the touch her face blanched. The sound of the slap she gave him was smothered by the pipes and horns and fiddles.

It all happened so fast. A quarrel sprouted from King Robb's shoulder, making him stagger, and behind him, one of Lord Walder's sons yanked Dacey Mormont up out of her seat and began punching her in the chest: once, twice, thrice. _No, not punching,_ Maerwynn realized as a redness bloomed through the bodice of her gown. _Stabbing._ Up in the gallery, it was crossbows the musicians were playing now instead of drums or lutes, and the quarrels came whistling through the air like music.

"Go," Septa Bensfort commanded. Then she grunted and grabbed her stomach. A quarrel had shot up from her gut. When she wrapped a hand around it, blood leaked through her fingers.

Sobbing, Maerwynn spun and ran for the door. Her mother was in the midst of lifting the heavy iron bar keeping them in when the first quarrel took her in the back.

Esmae Piper fell to her hands and knees, face taut with pain. "My boot," she said between gasps. "The right one. Check."

She did as she was told. Strapped to the outside of her mother's shoe was a dagger, sheathed in boiled leather. Maerwynn's fingers trembled as she undid the fastenings. It was the one her mother had told her about — the one she had taken with her from Essos.

"Now go." Tears swam in her mother's eyes. "Run until you're tired, and then keep running."

"I won't leave you," Maerwynn cried.

"You are a scion of the Old Blood of Valyria," her mother told her. "Your ancestors faced the doom of their people and survived. Now you must face yours."

_No, no, no,_ Maerwynn thought as her mother's eyes drooped and head lolled. _Please don't leave me. Not now. Not like this._

A hand seized her by the arm and yanked her up off the floor. _I'm going to die,_ she thought, _they're going to stab me in the chest over and over until they kill me, just as they did to Dacey Mormont._ But it wasn't a Frey that had grabbed her. It was Alyce.

Together they plunged through the doors, blind with panic, weaving between servants and washerwomen and men-at-arms. _Run until you're tired, and then keep running. You are a scion of the Old Blood of Valyria._ The grip of the dagger was slick with sweat, and Maerwynn was breathing hard when they reached the turret stair. Inside the pouch at her hip, Ser Whiskers was squirming wildly, just as frantic to escape as she was.

"Up or down?" Alyce asked.

Maerwynn froze. Up would take them to their chambers, where they could hide and wait out the chaos and perhaps be taken hostage, and down would lead them outside, but there would be guards waiting to kill them at the doors, for certain.

They went up, around and around, leaping over the narrow stone steps two and three at a time. 'Brave and beautiful' were the words of her house, but Maerwynn was feeling as far from brave as she had ever felt. Visenya of the Conquest had had a dragon to protect herself, and the powerful Queen Rhaenyra too; all Maerwynn had was a little bunny.

Alyce bowled into someone just as they were emerging from the turret stair, then reeled backward and fell, right into Maerwynn. The dagger went sailing out of her hand and skittered across the stone floor.

"What do we have here?" Quipped the man Alyce had bumped into. He had a garish smirk on his face, and dark hair thinning back from a sharp widow's peak. "Haven't your fathers ever told you that little ladies shouldn't toy with knives?" He picked up the dagger and slowly slid it out of its sheath. The ripples in the dark steel gleamed in the torchlight. "Valyrian steel," he said, in awe. "They say nothing holds an edge like it... Perhaps we should see if the tales are true."

There wasn't time to react. Quick as a striking snake, he slashed at Alyce's neck, and a string of red tears appeared across her throat like a ruby necklace. She lay on the ground, gasping and gurgling, a crimson current rushing down the front of her gown. Maerwynn wailed in horror at the sight of it. "Help," she heard herself scream, "someone, please!"

"Scream all you want, there'll be no help for you," the man told her.

With each step he took, Maerwynn backed another away, and soon she had flattened herself against the wall. _Please, if the gods are good, send me a knight... Send me a true hero..._ In the songs, the heroes always came when the maidens called upon them. "Please," she begged him, almost blind from her tears, "don't kill me, ser, I've done you no hurts—"

"Kill you?" His laughter was cruel and cold. "I'm not going to kill you... Yet."

He struck her across the face with a mailed hand. Pain crackled through her skull like lightning. "Stop it," she pleaded on deaf ears, "please, ser, don't, mercy!" She struggled, and in her haze she felt a hand press down on her wrists, pinning them against the wall above her head.

The man was looming above her now, and there was no mercy in his stare. "Hold still," he told her, and he reached down and began fumbling with something. Maerwynn closed her eyes and prayed for every hero she had ever known, for Prince Aemon the Dragonknight and Florian the Fool, for Ser Ryam Redwyne and Duncan the Tall, and even the bear from the silly song that had played during the bedding ceremony. She knew in her heart of hearts that none would come, and that dawn would find her dishonoured and dead in this very spot. _Perhaps the bards will write a song about me then, a tragedy, like Danny Flint or Jenny of Oldstones._ Hysterical laughter rose up in her gullet.

"Open your eyes," the man snapped at her, and she did, just in time to watch as a sword burst through the back of his skull. His blood felt like warm rain as it sprayed across her face.

It felt as though an eternity had passed before the blade retracted from his mouth. The man crumpled to the floor, twitching and smelling like a privy, and blood gushed forth from his wormy lips and out the back of his head, spreading beneath his body in a congealing red pool.

When Maerwynn looked up, she saw a pair of eyes staring down at her, a blue so pale they were almost grey. Roose Bolton. He pushed the man's body aside with his boot, clearing a path for her. "Can you walk, my lady?"

"I... I think so." Maerwynn took a nervous step away from the wall. Inside, her heart was fluttering wildly, like a bird in a cage.

"Lady Maerwynn Piper," Roose mused, studying her with those pale, pale eyes. "You will be my ward."


	3. Legacy

Marq seldom enjoyed weddings, but this was the worst by far.

_I’ve attended funerals more cheerful._ Roslin Frey had cried twice, first when the vows were exchanged and again during the bedding. Marq would have felt sorry for Edmure if it weren’t for his poor sister. Surely there was not a soul in the hall more miserable than Maerwynn’s.

_Apart from mine tomorrow when I wake up with the most dreadful headache in living memory._ It was not often that Marq drank so much, but he feared that he would not have been able to survive the night otherwise. Between Roose Bolton, and old, weaselly Walder Frey, there were enough unsightly faces in the room to contest every last Umber that had ever lived.

Besides, it wasn’t as though conversation was an option: Lewys was feeding everyone his stories, Maerwynn had a frown on her face more oft than a smile, and Aunt Alerie and her daughter Megga were as ill-mannered and intrusive as Marq remembered them being. He was better off in his cups. At least that way no one was like to bother him.

_Just when I was beginning to think the night couldn’t get any worse._ The musicians had taken to playing “The Rains of Castamere”, causing the low mutter of a hundred drunken conversations to fall to a deafening silence. _A queer choice of song, that,_ Marq thought. They were at war with the Lannisters; to play such a song was almost a slight to the king.

He looked to his father in uncertainty. Lord Clement Piper seemed just as off-put. “Take Maerwynn and Alyce on up to their chambers,” he commanded their septa. “It is time for bed. You go too, Esmae.”

With some protest from Maerwynn, she and Alyce were led away. “... Roslin’s weeping…” Father was murmuring to himself. “... And Edwyn’s order to leave Legacy outside...”

Marq felt a strange fear take root in the deepest corner of his gut. “We should go, too,” he decided.

They were just beginning to rise from their seats on the bench when the first of the quarrels came down upon them.

One drove itself into the table, causing the elaborate candle centrepiece to fall and set the wood ablaze. Megga made to stand, but before she could make distance, a man came behind her and seized her by a handful of her thin blonde hair, shoving her headfirst into the flames. When he finally let go, she rose, screaming, and the blackened flesh sloughed off her face as easily as butter sliding down a hot pan.

Marq reeled backward, gagging from the stench. His father grasped him by the front of his doublet and shoved him toward the doors.

He saw Dacey Mormont, battered and bleeding; the Lady of Winterfell, Catelyn Stark, screaming for the madness to end. On the ground lay her son, their king, pale and limp, with crossbow bolts jutting out from his leg and side. Greatjon Umber was wrestling a table off its trenches to shield him, but for every quarrel he blocked, another made its mark in his flesh. Ser Wendel Manderly rose to help, and an arrow went in his open mouth and out the back of his throat. All around Marq, the floor ran red with the blood of the men and women he had fought alongside with; the blood of the men and women with whom he had shared a table with for the past year.

And then he saw her.

On the ground laid his lady mother, as crumpled and beautiful as a broken doll. The shaft of a quarrel was sticking out of her back, right between the shoulder blades, and her gown was red in places it had not been before.

Marq rushed to her side and knelt. “Mother,” he said, and she looked up at him, dazed. “Don’t move. Father and I are going to get you out of here.” He reached for her hand. The skin was cold to the touch, and her fingers were as grey as the ash in a dying fire.

She stirred, her eyes glassy with pain. “... No. Your sister…”

Marq’s stomach roiled. “Did she make it out?” He heard himself ask, and he looked around. He did not see Maerwynn’s face, nor Alyce’s, but on the floor in a pool of her own congealing blood laid their septa, staring up at the ceiling with blank, unseeing eyes.

A hand yanked him up by the back of his doublet before his lady mother could answer. Marq twisted away, half-expecting it to be a Frey who had grabbed him, but it was only his lord father, with a grim look cast over his long face. “We must go,” he told him. “Now.” The doors of the great hall were open.

“I’ll carry Mother,” Marq decided, and he knelt back down to pick her up.

“She’s injured, my son, we—”

His father staggered as an arrow took him in the shoulder. A dozen more pelted the wall behind him. In the stands, Marq saw the archers drawing back their bowstrings with more; saw the crossbowmen reloading. It became suddenly apparent what he must do. _Lose both or lose one._

And then they were running, he and his father, plunging through the dim-lit halls of the Twins together. _Do not look back,_ Marq told himself as they flew around one corridor, then another, and another one after that. _You are not going that way._

They only came to a stop when they reached the winding turret stair that led to the exit. “Lewys?” His father asked, his breath ragged and his forehead glistening with sweat.

The guilt twisted in Marq’s stomach like a leaden serpent, heavy and cold. His little brother hadn’t even crossed his mind. “I did not see him,” he admitted after a silence.

“And Maerwynn?”

“Escaped, for a certainty,” Marq said. He could see the relief on his father’s face. “But Mother, she…”

His lord father’s mouth jerked as if Marq had slapped him. “Never you mind about your mother, now,” he said, his voice hoarse with grief. “Everything is going to be all right.” A single tear slid down his cheek, and Marq wondered if his father was saying the words for him or himself.

“Doubtless there’ll be men waiting for us at the bottom of the stair.” Lord Clement dried his eyes and unsheathed his greatsword, Legacy, holding the black leather grip and obsidian encrusted pommel with both hands. The blade was Valyrian steel, spell-forged and dark as if it were dipped in death, and marked with the ripples of a thousand foldings.

Marq stepped forward bravely. “I will lead us.”

His father shook his head. “No. You are unarmed. Stand behind me.” But there was blood leaking red through the white of his doublet where the arrowhead had found flesh, and his arms were trembling beneath the weight of his sword.

“Hand me Legacy,” Marq resolved.

Lord Clement looked him over with mute appeal. “What battles have you fought? The Battle of the Whispering Wood?”

Marq’s face hardened. “Aye, and we won.”

“Aye, you won,” his father conceded. “An ambush, not a battle. It was six thousand on two, and your foe was caught unawares. You are not the man grown you think you are. Now do as I say and stand behind me.” And with him leading the way, they crept down the winding turret stair, as silent as death.

Marq still thought he should have been handed Legacy. No matter what his father said, he was a man grown now; he’d proven it in more ways than one. _I’ve slain over two dozen men on the field of battle, and I was knighted by Ser Brynden the Blackfish himself._ He did not go to war to be told that he was still just a boy.

Marq had been so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t notice the iron sconce on the wall until he’d already bowled into it. It came free from its mount at once and fell with a deafening crash, and the flame from the torch inside flickered and died. He and his father looked at each other, and Marq hoped against hope that no one had heard… And the sconce, as if to answer, began to roll down the steps, one heavy clang after another, each somehow louder than the first.

“Who’s there?” A voice called from the bottom of the turret stair. Marq heard the familiar scraping song of a sword being drawn out from its scabbard, and the steady drum of footfalls coming closer, more than one pair.

He and Lord Clement continued their descent with slow trepidation, Legacy on high. With every step down, Marq’s terror mounted thricefold inside of him, clawing up his stomach and chest until it had sealed its icy hands around his throat, as if to choke him.

At the fourth landing they were met with the men. One held a longsword, the other a spiked iron cudgel, and both were clad in mail hauberk, with leather coifs strapped to their heads. They were Frey men, Marq knew at once. _Only a Frey would wear one of those stupid fucking caps._

“Leaving so soon?” Asked the one holding the longsword. He was pale and slender, with lank dark hair and a broad grin. “Feast not good enough for you?”

“Stand down,” Lord Clement warned, “or die.” The men looked to each other in amused disbelief before advancing.

The one with the cudgel was the first to attack, hacking through the air with clumsy savagery. Father parried the blows with a precision that only years of training and battle experience could forge. _Warrior, guide him,_ Marq prayed. _Lend him your strength and shield._ Steel rang on steel as his father checked a third blow, then a fourth, before falling back a step, grimacing. Sweat ran down his temple and in rivulets over his cheeks.

It was as though the gods had heard Marq’s prayer: Lord Clement’s steel met skin as Legacy came singing down upon the man’s neck, severing the head from his body in one clean swipe. The cudgel he’d been holding fell from between his dead fingers and clattered to the floor, where Marq knelt to pick it up.

He’d only looked away for an instant, but an instant was all it had taken for the man with the longsword to land a cut on his father; a low swing, right on the thigh. Marq rose to his defence at once, and in three long strides he’d come up behind the man and buried the cudgel into the back of his skull, where it stuck as he fell.

He put a boot on the man’s neck to steady himself as he yanked the cudgel free. It came loose with a grisly wet squelch, and the blood went leaking out of the punctures the spikes had left behind, stinking of copper and rust.

Then Marq rushed to his father’s side.

Pain and grief swam as one in Lord Clement Piper’s dark blue eyes. He was anchoring himself on Legacy’s pommel, careful not to stand on his injured leg. “I’m all right,” he insisted, but he winced despite himself, and reached helplessly for the wound on his thigh.

Marq looked down. His father’s pant leg was torn where the cut had been made, and through the ripped fabric, he glimpsed a bone-deep gash.

Marq had to look away, for the sight of it made him dizzy. “... We need to keep going, you… You can lean your weight on me, and I’ll walk us out.” His stomach was a roil, yet he knew he must keep on. Balking was for cravens. _And I am no craven._

“Help me sit,” his father commanded, and Marq was helpless to obey him. “You are my eldest son and heir. Pinkmaiden will fall to you now, as it once did to me.” He handed over Legacy, then the sheath, and suddenly Marq knew what it was his father meant for him to do.

“There is time,” he insisted, pushing the sword away. “And if you aren’t able to walk, I can fetch us a horse and come back. Then we can find Maerwynn and Lew and ride home, all of us, together.” Even Marq knew it was a horribly pathetic plan, like something Maerwynn might read in one of those vapid stories she loved so much. The truth was that only one of them would be leaving the Twins that night, and it would not be Lord Clement.

“Look at me.” When Marq did not, his father seized him by the chin and forced his head up. “I am a dead man, but you are not.” He let go, then took him by the hand and made his fingers close around Legacy’s smooth leather grip. “Now go. If not for me, for House Piper; for your brother and sister. If they still live, they need you now more than ever.”

“This way,” a voice said somewhere above them, unseen in the labyrinth of stairs. “I heard someone.” By the footfalls alone, Marq could tell that it was more than two men coming this time.

He knew that he would have to face difficult decisions when he became lord of House Piper, but he had not prepared for his first being the hardest of all. “If they give you the opportunity to surrender, do it.” With his insides turning as if they were mortar being mixed by a stonemason, he handed his father the bloodied cudgel.

Lord Clement Piper rose on unsteady feet. “I’d rather be dead than in chains,” he said through clenched teeth, and with what seemed the last of his strength, he raised the cudgel high in the air, as heroic and righteous as Ser Arthur Dayne, or Symeon Star-Eyes from the tales of old. “Over here, you shits!”

And then Marq was running again, only this time he was alone. _Do not look back,_ he told himself as he plunged through the night, weaving blind between flaming tents and upended carts in his search for the stables. _You are not going that way._ The slaughter was just as bad outside as it was in. Soldiers were being cut down in their cups, or dragged away to be beaten and hanged; made to stand in a line so the crossbowmen could shoot them down. It was nigh impossible to know who fought for who, and so Marq kept his head down and avoided everyone. _You are the future of House Piper, the last living heir. You can be brave._

The stable was ablaze when he found his way there. Flames were licking up its sides from where a torch had fallen on straw, and the thatched roof was hidden in a haze of black and grey smoke, so thick Marq could scarce breathe when he neared it. Even from outside, he could see the fierce tongues of yellow and red flame roaring up the rafters and snaking down the walls, coughing up plumes of glowing orange stars that went swirling through the night air in a fiery dance. He could feel the ferocity of the heat from where he was standing, four metres off.

_Without a horse, I am as good as dead._ There was no other way but forward. Marq put a hand over his mouth and nose and pressed on, past the empty stalls and the flames, crouching low to avoid the smoke where it was thickest. When he was halfway through the stable, a beam came loose above him and fell, landing in the hay rushes underfoot and lighting them afire, too. And still Marq made himself go on, one foot after the other, each step closer to freedom than the one before.

The further he walked, the hotter it became. It was the closest thing to hell Marq Piper ever hoped to know. The smell of burnt hair and flesh clung to the air like perfume, and the heat was so thick and suffocating that if his eyes had been closed and the horses were not screaming, he’d have thought he walked into a furnace.

He had just begun to cough when he found the first horse. It was a yearling, most like; she was small and shivering, and when Marq reached out to stroke her head, she squealed at him and turned away.

It was just his luck. _I’m trying to help you, you dim-witted beast,_ he wanted to scream at her. _You’re hardly in a position to be selective._ But he knew yelling was only like to spook her further, and so instead he said, “hush, now, it’s alright,” and pet at her until she calmed enough to let him mount.

Immediately, the mare reared up and tried bucking him off. Marq held on and gave her a kick. _Go, now, or you’ll have killed us both, if not by the fire then by the Freys._

And suddenly they were flying, past the flames and into the night. For a moment Marq felt dizzy, his relief was so intense, and he’d had to squeeze on with his thighs to keep from falling off. 

As they fled, he never so much as looked back. _I am not going that way._ Pinkmaiden was his now, and House Piper, and above all of that, his sister was somewhere out there, he knew she was. _I must live. If not for me, for her._

He rode until the Twins disappeared behind him and he could no longer hear the screams. Under the veil of the foliage, Marq followed the southward stream of the Green Fork to keep from losing his way, and when the mare began to tire, he climbed down from her back, made a bed of leaves in the grass, and tried to sleep. Tomorrow he would look for Maerwynn, he decided. _I will find her, or I will die trying._

He couldn’t recall when sleep took him, but when he woke to the sound of a branch snapping underfoot, and the sun glaring down at him through the cracks in the leaves overhead, he knew it must have.

Marq sat up at once and began to draw Legacy out from its scabbard.

“Ah, ah, ah,” a voice behind him said. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Reluctantly, Marq stayed his hand on the pommel and turned around.

Behind him stood a skinny youth with dark hair cropped short. In a longbow as tall as he was, he had an arrow nocked and ready to be loosed.

“You’d best heed his warning, lad,” said a second voice. Without turning his head, Marq followed the sound. This man was older than the archer, with the whiskery beginnings of a moustache above his lip, and a head of wild brown hair. “Anguy here would have three shafts through you before you even unsheathed the damned thing.”

_Anguy._ Marq recognized that name, though from where he could not say. “Yeah, I’d wager he’d like to put his shaft through me,” he spat. “Put down the bow you nance and face me like a real man, steel on steel.”

Anguy just laughed. “Only a brat of high birth would speak so arrogantly with an arrow pointed at his skull. Who are you?”

“Ser Marq Piper,” he told them. “And if it’s gold you’re after, I’m afraid I don’t have any to give.”

“Ser Marq Piper,” Anguy said, tasting the name. “House Piper is bannermen to House Tully. You were at that bloody wedding, weren’t you?”

_Bloody is one way to put it,_ Marq thought grimly. “Aye, I was,” he conceded. “Why? You sent by the Freys to pick off the survivors?”

“We are the Brotherhood Without Banners,” Anguy told him, “the knights of the hollow hill. And we don’t answer to no fucking Freys.”

Marq snorted. “Then who do _‘the knights of the hollow hill’_ fight for?”

“King Robert Baratheon,” the brown-haired man said proudly. “First of his name.”

Marq made a face. “Are you also the knights of living under a rock? King Robert Baratheon is dead.”

“Might be he is,” Anguy admitted, “but his realm lives on. And we mean to fight for it.”

Marq inspected their garb. They didn’t _look_ like king’s men; they looked like outlaws, the pair of them, and they didn’t even have horses. “... If you aren’t bandits, then what do you mean to do with me?”

“We want you to come with us.” Anguy lowered his bow. “Get some food into your belly.”

“Food or a sword?”

Anguy ignored his comment. “There’s an inn not far upstream kept by some friends of ours. We can share some ale and a bite of bread, but you’ll have to meet him first.”

“Him?” Marq asked.

“No more questions.” Anguy slid the arrow back into a quiver slung about his shoulder. Behind him, Marq glimpsed the other man sheathing his sword.

“And why should I trust you?” Marq demanded.

Anguy grinned down at him before offering a freckled hand. “We haven’t killed you yet, have we?”


	4. The Road North

Lord Bolton came for her at dawn.

Maerwynn was awake when he knocked. She’d meant to sleep that night, to be well-rested for the morrow’s ride north, but a deep panic was upon her, and it was all she could do not to cry.

She’d been confined to her chambers after the awful thing had happened, and no one had spoken a word to her since. Maerwynn only wanted to know what was happening; where her family was. Last she knew, her mother had been terribly hurt.

_But she could be all right,_ she reminded herself. Her father had told her many a story about the wounds he’d taken during Robert’s Rebellion, and he was just fine now. People got hurt and lived all the time.

_Perhaps she was taken prisoner like me,_ she’d wondered as she lay abed that night, too restless for sleep. _She could be in her chambers right now, with Father and Marq and Lew…_ Maerwynn thought they might let her see her family if she asked nicely and observed all the right courtesies, but the men guarding her wouldn’t answer any of her questions, even when she wept and pleaded to them through the door.

That was when she’d heard _it._

Outside, the men were shouting _“the King in the North,”_ and thinking help had come at last, Maerwynn scrambled to pull a stool over to her window to look. _And then I saw…_

Thinking about it made her eyes fill with tears, they had defiled him so. _They took his wolf’s head and sewed it onto his body, and crowned it and paraded it around the courtyard like it was some sort of jape._ They were his bannermen; she didn’t understand how they could do something so treacherous, so foul. _They made a sacred vow to shield his back and keep his counsel and give their lives for his if need be, and instead they took it away from him, and made a mockery of it all._ She had spoken to him mere hours ago… _We danced together at the feast, and he told me I reminded him of his sister._ Now he was dead, and he would never dance with anyone again, not ever.

_And neither will Alyce._ Maerwynn still did not understand why the man had done it. She was a good girl, young and pretty and gently bred. What could he have hoped to gain by harming her?

_She used to braid my hair, and dry my tears when I was sad._ Some nights they even slept in each other’s arms like sisters. _We’ll never be able to steal sweets from the kitchens again, or tell each other secrets, or teach the ravens in the rookery to say obscenities._ It was Maerwynn who had held the dagger, and Alyce Pemford who had paid the price.

_The dagger._ That awoke a new anger inside of her, fierce and hot. Lord Bolton had taken it away after he’d rescued her, even after she explained that it had belonged to her mother; that it was special.

_It was the very last thing she gave me,_ Maerwynn thought guiltily. _She trusted me to keep it safe, and it’s in someone else’s hands already._ Surely she was the worst daughter who had ever lived.

Lord Bolton knocked again. “My lady. I mean for us to ride within the hour.”

“A moment please, my lord, if you would be so kind,” she told him. He permitted her that. Maerwynn stood slowly— so as to not wake Ser Whiskers, who was sleeping beside her— and went to the chest at the foot of her bed, her legs weak as water.

She knelt, opened it, and raised the silvered looking glass laying neatly atop her folded clothes. The face that stared back at her was almost a stranger’s. A purply black bruise had taken shape along the outside of her eye, from her temple to her cheek. It was crusted with blood from a shallow gash in the middle, where the man’s mail had met skin. 

Maerwynn had almost forgotten about how he’d hit her. She supposed that was why her head was throbbing so painfully. _He pinned me against the wall and said the cruellest of words, and he wouldn’t let me go, even when I cried and begged and told him I had done him no hurts._

“A bath,” she decided all at once. “Please, before we leave, my lord.”

Lord Bolton never answered, but Maerwynn knew he had obliged when a flock of serving women entered several minutes later, carrying pails of water and soft cloths. None would look her in the eye, even as they began to undress her for her bath.

Taking off the gown only made her feel all the worse. It had been new; a gift from her lady mother and lord father. _Meereenese silk,_ she thought dully. _Expensive and white and beautiful._

It was not white anymore, that much was plain to see: from bodice to skirts, the dress was covered in splatters of deep, red-brown blood, and worse, it had soaked through to her smallclothes, too. When the servants began lifting her undersilk up over her head, it wouldn’t budge, and they had to peel it off where the dried blood had made the fabric stick to her skin.

That only served to remind her of the gruesome way it had gotten there in the first place. When Maerwynn closed her eyes, she could still see the point of the sword coming through the man’s mouth— red and wet with his blood— and hear the terrible, ugly sucking sounds he had made as he struggled for breath. _He deserved it,_ she told herself, but her stomach gave a sudden lurch all the same, and soon she was reaching for one of the empty pails the servants had used to fetch the water for her bath.

She retched until her throat was sore and her tummy was empty and she was just heaving air. Maerwynn hadn’t heard Ser Whiskers’ approach, but suddenly she could feel him nuzzling up against her leg, and when she looked down, she found him staring up at her with those bright red eyes.

One of the servants parted from the others and took the pail away, nose wrinkled in disgust. The two remaining helped Maerwynn into her bath. It took both of them, and they had to hold her up by the arms, for her legs were trembling so.

The water was tepid at best on the surface, and beneath that freezing cold. Maerwynn sat naked and shivering as the serving women scrubbed her body clean, and tried not to notice as the water around her turned pink. When her stomach began to churn again, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wooden edge of the tub, escaping to her thoughts.

She found herself thinking of Ser Edmure and his little wife Roslin Frey, praying that they were safe. _Surely Lord Walder wouldn’t allow harm to befall either of them._ In the eyes of gods and men, their deaths would be kinslaying, even Edmure’s. They had said the words.

_I wonder if_ I _will ever get to say the words,_ she thought glumly. For years Maerwynn had thought Edmure was her one true love, and in an instant he had been snatched away from her. _I wish that one day I marry someone handsome and highborn and strong, and that my vassals love me._ Outside, the wind was howling fiercely against the castle walls, almost like a wolf. _A ghost wolf,_ a small voice inside her corrected. Her skin prickled with goose flesh.

Maerwynn felt a little better after her bath. She put on a fresh undersilk and choiced a black gown on top of that, a sign of mourning for Alyce, King Robb, and the rest of the murdered northmen. After that the servants sat her down to do her hair, but Maerwynn sent them away. _Alyce always did my hair._ She didn’t want anyone else touching it. Alone but for Ser Whiskers, she brushed it through herself and gathered the top half back into a single braid, the way Alyce might have if she were still there.

Lord Bolton returned to give her his summons when Maerwynn was just finishing packing up her things. He was flanked on either side by a pair of men in coned half helms and black surcoats, whose chests were embroidered in red thread with the flayed man of his house. Roose instructed them to collect her things, then offered her an arm. For half a heartbeat Maerwynn debated taking it, wondering if he had been involved in the horrors of the night…

… But then she remembered that he had saved her life, and so she took his arm with one hand, and with the other held Ser Whiskers tight to her chest. Regardless of what he had done for her, there was something in Lord Bolton’s face that still frightened her so. His eyes were pale and cold, like two white moons, and his hair long and dark. He was her hero, in truth, and yet he looked as much a villain as had ever lived.

“Pardons, my lord, I… I owe you my deepest gratitude,” she said haltingly. “Thank you for saving me… You were so brave, and… Kind...” She was tempted to ask about the dagger, but Maerwynn was hoping he would let her visit her family before they left, and her septa had always said that to a catch a fly, one must needs entice it with honey first.

“Thank you, my lady,” he said in his whispery soft voice. “I count that as high praise.”

With his men trailing behind carrying her things, they began their descent down the long turret stairway. _I went up with Alyce, and now I am coming down alone,_ she thought glumly. The darkness in the stair had frightened her last night, but she was grateful for it now. It hid the tears welling in her eyes.

_Brave and beautiful,_ Maerwynn reminded herself, for those were the words of her house. _I can be brave, just like Marq._ Even if she couldn’t, she had to.

_I must ask now._ If she waited, there might be no other chance. “Might I see my family before we leave, my lord?” She willed herself to say after a long silence.

Lord Bolton did not look at her when he answered. Maerwynn was grateful for that; she did not like meeting his pale, pale gaze. “Any other prisoners are Lord Walder’s province, I am sorry to say.”

Something in the way he said it told her that he was not really sorry to say it at all. “Pray pardons, but… Can’t you speak to him, my lord?”

“The North is leagues away,” Lord Bolton began, “nigh a month’s ride from here, notwithstanding the wagons and foot soldiers, and the villages that we will have to break at for food and recruits. Such haggles with Lord Walder would only serve to further slow our travel.”

_I don’t care about slowing our travel,_ she wanted to yell at him. _And I don’t care about you, or Lord Walder, or your stupid soldiers and recruits._ But she was too afraid to say any of that, so instead she said nothing.

They went down one long dark passageway, then another before Lord Bolton found the door he wanted. It opened to the courtyard, where the wagons and carts and wheelhouses were stationed. Maerwynn spotted her mother’s among them, with its white pinewood walls, silver spokes, and leaven inlay. She might have cried out with joy at the sight of it, if it weren’t for what was happening behind.

Up on the battlements, there were men hanging corpses from each stone merlon, flayed but for their faces. “What are they doing?” Maerwynn demanded, yanking her hand away from Lord Bolton’s arm.

“Nothing I had not asked of them,” he answered softly.

Maerwynn felt all warmth drain from her face. “You told them to hang the… The…” She could not say it. There was a pressure in her throat, like she was going to retch again.

“Yes, I did,” he said, as casual as if he were discussing dinner. “I flayed the men myself. It is meticulous work; I shan’t let it go to waste.”

Sudden panic made her dizzy and faint. It was true, everything that Lewys had told her. “I don’t want to go to the Dreadfort, I want to go _home._ Please, my lord, don’t make me go, don’t take my skin… I’ll be good, I swear it, by the old gods and the new…”

Lord Bolton did not seem at all affected by her distress; if anything, he looked as though he were growing bored. “You must go,” he told her. “You will wed Ramsay Snow, my bastard.”

The words felt like a punch in her gut. “Your _bastard?_ But… I can’t marry a bastard...” She was dreaming, she had to be. _This is all just one terrible nightmare._ Tomorrow she would wake in her featherbed at Pinkmaiden, and she’d tell Alyce and Marq and Lew everything that had happened over breakfast, while Septa Bensfort squawked at her for cutting her meat wrong.

“You can and you will,” Lord Bolton said in that whispery soft voice he had. “I am Warden of the North now, and as it stands, Ramsay is my only son and heir — trueborn or base. Being wed to him would make you Lady of Winterfell and the Dreadfort one day… Surely an exciting prospect for a young noble lady such as yourself.”

_Exciting?_ Part of her wanted to laugh; another part wanted to cry. Mostly she wanted to hit him, again and again, until his face was red and bloody like the men swaying from the castle walls. “I would sooner marry a farmhand than a son of yours,” she said, so fiercely she almost spat the words.

Even that did not change the flat, emotionless look Roose had on his face. “You are my ward, my lady,” he said, so quietly Maerwynn had to hold her breath to listen. “Do not forget that.”

His gaze lingered for what seemed an eternity before finally he turned and went to the wheelhouse. There was no choice but to follow. The men went past her and began loading her belongings inside.

It wasn’t until Maerwynn drew closer that she noticed Willem and his father dead in the grass, lying facedown in their own blood. “Why?” She asked. “They were only horsemen…” Willem was young, scarce a year older than her. _He was always kind to me._ At Pinkmaiden, he used to give her salt to let the horses lick off her hand.

“They were traitors,” said Lord Bolton, with an air of cold superiority. “As was Robb Stark.”

_No,_ she thought. _You are._ The real traitor was the man that put on a mummer’s farce of loyalty and slew his enemies after they had supped on his meat and mead, not the one that went to war and fought them fair.

Maerwynn’s anger was rising inside her once again, but she was too afraid to speak up a second time and risk herself being hurt. _Besides, they were only servants,_ she told herself. They wouldn’t be missed, not the way King Robb would be.

She willed her anger away and went up the steps of the wheelhouse in silence, holding Ser Whiskers with one hand and her skirts with the other.

In the horrors of the night, the inside of the carriage had been ransacked: the pillows on the window seat were all a feathered tatter, and one of her mother’s chests had been knocked over by the looters, spilling dresses and corsets and jewelry. Amidst it was the dragon egg her mother had told her about; the one from Asshai. Its scaly purple shell had been smashed to bits and pieces.

Maerwynn set Ser Whiskers down on what remained of the window seat, then knelt and tried to gather the pieces of the egg back together.

It was no use. In tears, she picked up the largest of the shards and clutched it to her heart. The sunlight slanting through the window had warmed it, and it was hot in her hand.

She took one of her mother’s gowns and buried her face in the fabric, inhaling the scent as deep she could. It was almost as though she was there with her then...

_… But she isn’t,_ Maerwynn reminded herself, _and she won’t be for a long time._ The tears came out in a rush. _I can’t even say goodbye._ It wasn’t fair, not any of it. This past day had been the worst she had ever lived, and now, on top of it all, she was being carted off to the North to marry some baseborn nobody.

She didn’t dare hope that Lord Bolton would allow her family to come for the ceremony; not after what he had said to her outside. _I thought he was my hero, but I was wrong._ He was her captor. _I am just a rabbit in a snare. One wrong move and I am dead._

The wheelhouse began to jostle with movement. Sniffling, Maerwynn folded up her mother’s gown and returned it to the chest, then went to the window seat and parted the curtain, peering out at the world beyond. There was a loud groan as the heavy iron portcullis opened, and then they were outside, _really_ outside, shuddering along a long dirt road.

Maerwynn was painfully reminded of how excited she had been to come here. Outside, the grass was blackened where the evening’s fires had swept over them, and the tents and pavilions of King Robb’s bannermen were all aruin, caved in on themselves, or destroyed by the flames like everything else. Corpses swayed from some of the trees, and a thousand more littered the ground underneath. _‘Life is not a song, my sweet girl,’_ she recalled her mother saying the night before, as she’d been preparing for the feast.

That was wrong. _Mine is,_ she thought hollowly. _A tragedy._

Maerwynn let the curtains fall shut. She did not want to see any more. Cradling Ser Whiskers as one might cradle a baby, she went to her room and got into bed, pulling the blankets up over herself. It was childish, she knew, but somehow it made her feel safer. In the darkness underneath she hugged Ser Whiskers tight.

The steady jostle and creak of the wheelhouse reminded her of times gone by; of visits to the beach with her family, or to Riverrun, where they would oft go under the guise that Edmure needed time to court her (when really it was because Marq wanted to see him, and her father wanted to see Ser Brynden).

Maerwynn did not want to marry this Ramsay. She wanted to go home, and most of all, she wanted see her family. _With the blankets up over my head, I could be anywhere, doing anything._ And so she pretended that she was on one such visit to the beach: to the God’s Eye lake, with its glittering blue–green waters and majestic black swans, surrounded by lush rolling hills, and overlooked by the ancient, towering ruins of Harrenhal...

… Only when she opened her eyes again, she was not at the God’s Eye lake, but rather the courtyard of some great castle.

There were soldiers in grey woollen surcoats in front of her, and half a dozen small children at play. Overhead, snow was drifting down in thick flurries. Maerwynn reached out a hand to catch some, and it went right through her palm, as though she weren’t really there at all.

_You can’t touch anything,_ said a voice behind her, _nor can you speak to anyone._

Maerwynn turned around, startled. A crow stared back at her from its perch atop the brim of an open corn barrel.

“Where am I?” She asked it.

The crow flapped its wings, glided over to her still outstretched hand, and landed atop her finger. _You are where you need to be, it told her._

“But I’m not truly here.” She was in a wheelhouse sleeping right now, on her way to the North.

_You are in the North,_ said the crow. _Just not now, or tomorrow. In due course. Time is today and yesterday, tomorrow and beyond._

“It’s just a dream,” she insisted.

_Is it?_ Asked the crow.

“Yes.” The very last thing she remembered was laying down with Ser Whiskers in the wheelhouse. She had to be dreaming.

_Not dreaming,_ the crow corrected. _Seeing._

Maerwynn looked around. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see.

_Let me show you,_ said the crow. _Look. What do you see?_

She saw battlements as tall as any she had ever seen, and sprawling towers with diamond–shaped windows. One of the towers was broken.

_Not up there,_ urged the crow. _Down. Look around you._

She did. There were two little boys playing in the snow, and three girls watching them, the youngest of whom was no older than five.

The boys were packing the snow into balls with their tiny gloved hands and throwing them at each other. _A snow battle,_ Maerwynn realized with excitement. Her brothers had told her about those. The last winter had been when she was only a babe, and she had never been able to play in the snow herself.

“I’m Daeron the Young Dragon!” One of the boys shouted. He was small and skinny, with a long, solemn face, and eyes so dark they were almost black.

“And I’m Ser Ryam Redwyne!” The other shouted back, red hair falling in front of his eyes as he ran. The falling snow clung amongst it, gathering at the top of his head like a frosty crown.

“I’m Good Queen Alysanne!” One of the little girls watching them insisted.

“No, you’re just Sansa, stupid,” said the smaller one next to her, and she gave her a hard shove.

The Sansa girl fell down into the snow, shrieking, _“Arya! You spoil everything!”_

While the red–haired boy was distracted and laughing, the one who claimed himself to be Daeron the Young Dragon hit him full–on in the face with a snowball, hard enough to make him stagger. It must have been icy where he was standing, for afterward he lost his footing and went down hard, then began to cry. The snow turned red where his head was, like his hair.

_“Mother!”_ Sansa went shrieking into the castle. _“Robb’s hurt, and it’s all Jon Snow’s fault!”_

_Snow._ Maerwynn wrinkled up her nose. _He’s a bastard._

_Is he?_ Asked the crow.

“Yes.” Snow was a bastard surname in the North. Everyone knew that.

Arya was running into the castle after Sansa. _“Liar! He didn’t mean to do it!”_

The third girl knelt down to check on Robb, who was snot–nosed and crying. “Don’t worry,” she was telling him. “Maester Luwin will make it better.” She took his hand and held it, then turned to Jon Snow and said, “you should go, before my mother comes out.”

“I want to make sure he’s all right,” Jon said stubbornly.

A red–haired woman came storming out then, woolen skirts rippling in the wind. Maerwynn recognized her at once. “That’s Lady Stark,” she told the crow excitedly. A greying maester was trailing behind her, garbed in robes of grey trimmed with white fur. That meant they were at Winterfell, and...

“... The boy on the ground is King Robb.” She felt an ache in her chest, right where her heart was.

_Not that,_ the crow snapped at her. _Forget that, you do not need it. Put it away. Look with your_ eyes, _not your heart._

Lady Stark and the maester were helping up Robb, who had blood running down the side of his face. “I’ll help carry him,” said Jon Snow, and he reached for an arm.

“You’ve done enough for one day, bastard,” Lady Stark snapped. “I pray this is the last straw that gets you sent back to whatever lowborn whore of a mother you came from.” If looks could kill, then Jon Snow would be dead.

He turned away and fled, his dark eyes filled with mortified tears.

The other girl— who Maerwynn now knew to be Princess Vanya— glared up at Lady Stark, pale face flushed with anger. “We were _playing,_” she shouted, small hands curling into fists at her sides. “It was only an accident!”

“As was he,” came her mother’s cold response.

_How wrong she is,_ the crow mused.

“Is this what you meant to show me?” Maerwynn demanded. All it had done was make her feel terrible.

_This and more._

“I don’t want to see more,” she told the crow. “I want to go home.”

_You can’t go home._

“Then I want to die.”

_You can’t die._

Maerwynn shook her hand until the crow took to the air, cawing. She would kill herself before she married that Ramsay, she _would._

_Listen to me,_ said the crow, landing atop her shoulder. _Understand what I am telling you._

“Then _help_ me,” she begged. “_Please._ Show me.”

_If I must..._

The castle blew out like a candle in a storm, and the courtyard she had been standing in was turned to darkness. _Madness and greatness… Anguish and ecstasy…_ A spear went through the heart of a red sun burning bright, and the moon bled and blackened for its loss. _Only when the dragon has been woken from stone…_ The sky wept a thousand icy tears, and half the world froze over beneath it. Maerwynn moved forward. A pair of red eyes opened in the darkness, watching her as she went past.

_Queen of the ashes…_ A gargoyle with mismatched eyes buried a dagger hilt–deep in a dragon’s back, and in its despair, it opened its mouth and turned the other half of the world to red and green flame. Men ran for the ice, and fell and rose and fell again.

_You must go to the land of a hundred silent screams, where a millennia is but a moment…_ Roots coiled around her legs like wooden serpents. _Fight,_ the crow urged her. She began to cry. _You are afraid… Good. Now you understand. Only the prince that was promised can stop it._ A single falling star streaked by overhead, pale as milk in the darkness. _From the fire his sword shall ignite, for only dawn can bring the light._

Maerwynn woke gasping. Somewhere outside, a lone wolf began to howl.


	5. The Kiss of Life

His head was throbbing from all the wine he had drunk the night before, and the pain felt as though someone had taken an axe to his skull. Perhaps they had. For all he knew, he was in the seventh hell right now, doomed to follow these two dullards through the wood for the rest of eternity. The constant singing of Anguy’s companion made it seem that way. 

The first thing Anguy had done when the journey began was seat himself upon the mare, forcing Marq to travel afoot. That was fine by him, so long as they left Legacy alone, and thus far they had… Although they had bound his wrists together with hempen rope to ensure he would not use it, which was another misery in and of itself. 

It had rained earlier that morning, too; a thin drizzle that chilled Marq to the core, leaving him soaked and shivering. He might have laughed at the irony of it all if he were in a better mood. _Even the gods delight to piss on me._ Though, on second thought, he supposed anything was better than the fire.

True to their word, the men (if Anguy could be considered a man) still would not tell him where they were going, nor who they were bringing him to. He had other questions that wanted answering, however— regarding who they were, and from whence they had come— and they permitted him answer for those. 

Anguy’s companion with the wild brown hair was from the Riverlands like Marq, and as he told it, he was called Tom of Sevenstreams by some, and Tom of Sevenstrings by others. _Small wonder for the latter,_ Marq thought. He had quickly learned that when Tom was not singing and playing his woodharp, he was talking. _A bard loves nothing half so well as the sound of his own voice._

Thus far, he’d belted out “The Fair Maids of Summer” and “The Dornishman’s Wife,” and thrice he launched into a piercing trill of “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”. After that, he went on a tirade about how some songs have no need for lyrics, and he began strumming his woodharp in silence to prove it, but just as Marq’s headache was subsiding, the screeching started all over again with “The Winter Maid”. 

That was even worse than the rest. It was a dreary, northern song of lament about a woman losing her love to the cold, and crying as she clutched his corpse. _“In the frozen winter night, on the cold breath of the breeze, I saw a maiden fair and white, singing a song amid her weeps… The song was full of longing, for her love who did depart, and my tears began a-falling, for I understood her with all my heart…”_

Anguy himself was a commoner from the Dornish Marches. Marq thought he recognized the name earlier that morning when he heard it, and he had been right: Anguy had participated in the archery competition at the Hand’s Tourney in King’s Landing and won, outshooting Ser Balon Swann and Jalabhar Xho at a hundred paces. 

_There were ten thousand gold dragons in that victory._ It was more than enough to set a man for life, but according to Anguy, he’d already feasted and fucked his way down to the last silver. _‘The only things worthy of a man’s hard-earned coin,’_ he’d reasoned with a freckly smile. 

Marq had been less fortunate in his placing; he’d entered the mêlée and lost to the red freak, Thoros of Myr. _It was no true victory,_ he thought bitterly. _The drunk lit his sword with wildfire and spooked my mount._ At first, he could scarce believe that such a trick was even allowed, but then he remembered that Thoros was a fierce friend to the king, Robert Baratheon. In hindsight, it should have been obvious why his exploits in the competition were overlooked. 

Tom was still singing that abhorrent song of his. _“The tongue she sang in was old and lost, for I could not understand her words, but at the sound, he did defrost, and then began to stir… Oh, how she wept, and how she sang, that maid under the tree, for her prince who gave his life, for all of humanity…”_

Marq could not help but think of his sister. _Maerwynn would declare this song a great romantic tragedy, and tears would fill her eyes at the wretchedness of the lyrics._ Suddenly he could no longer abide it. “Why do you let that oaf sing while you travel?” He snapped at Anguy. 

It became apparent that he had asked the question loud enough for “that oaf” to hear. “It makes the journey all the more merry, wouldn’t you agree?” Tom answered behind him as he continued to strum.

Marq made a face. “It’s like to make you all the more dead,” he scoffed. 

“There are worse things than dying with a song on your lips.” 

“Better things, too, like not dying at all.” 

Tom drew a long, plaintive chord from the woodharp. “Valar morghulis.”

Marq was familiar with the phrase. Under his mother’s orders, Maester Brandeth had spent several hours each afternoon tutoring he and his siblings in High Valyrian. “Aye, all men must die,” he conceded, “but some sooner than most; especially when they go plundering through the wood yodelling like that.” 

Anguy gave a rueful smile. “Leave Tom be, lad. A good song never hurt anyone.”

“Speak for yourself, ginger. My head is pounding dreadfully.” He chafed at the ropes around his wrists. They seemed to be growing tighter and tighter as the journey to the ominous “him” wore on, and Marq’s skin was almost raw. “How much farther is it?” 

“Farther,” said Anguy simply.

Marq never wanted to hit him so much as he did then. He did not have all day to stumble through the wood after these two idiots; he had to find Maerwynn. _She’s my sister. She needs me._ If she had survived at all, she would not make it much longer without him. The Trident was shallow and lush with fish, and to spear one was as easy as standing onshore and using a sharpened stick… 

… But Marq knew his sister better than to expect that of her — not the same little girl that ran splashing through the water garden just to save a mouse from drowning. _And dressed in her finest silks,_ he recalled. When Maerwynn had entered the Great Hall for supper that evening, trailing mud and dripping pond water, their lady mother had screamed, and Marq had never seen her septa so angry. Father only laughed and sent her away to change. _‘If you don’t want her to ruin her silks, then you’d best not dress her in them,’_ he’d told them. 

A sharp longing lanced through his chest. They were all dead now: Father and Mother, and probably Little Lew as well for all he knew. _Dead._ Marq thought the word, just to see if that would make it feel real. _They’re dead._

Then why did he feel so empty, so numb? It felt as though there was a hole inside him; a deep void in his heart where his family and friends had once been. _I survived, but not all of me,_ he thought. _When the Freys killed them, they killed a part of me, too._

Marq did not want to think about it any longer, and fortunately, it seemed as though he would not have to. They had reached their destination: a small clearing in the deep of the wood, occupied by a flagless encampment. In the centre stood a score of both men and women alike, gathered around a barren fire pit filled with ash. They were watching as a man in ratty pink robes with oddments of armour buckled on assembled a lay of kindling, propping each stick against another so that they formed a wooden tent. 

When it was done, the man slipped his hands up into his sleeves. One fist came back out grasping a firesteel wrought in the shape of a heart, and the other a lump of flint. Red sparks flashed as he brought them together, and soon after, a fire was crackling before him, illuminating the side of his face, pale and shrunken and wrinkled.

Anguy broke away from Marq and Tom to tie off the mare where some other horses had been racked-up. Dead leaves crunched under his boots, prompting one of the women sitting by the fire to lift her eyes — or _eye,_ rather, for she was missing one. She said something in a voice too low for Marq to hear then, and the man in pink turned his head their direction...

… And Marq was shocked to see the decrepit face of a man he once knew — the face of Thoros of Myr. _No, it can’t be…_ The red priest had been fat and bald and jovial the last he saw of him. This man was thin as a corpse, with a drooping face and a head of long, shaggy grey hair.

Thoros— if that _was_ Thoros— was grinning weakly. “Ser Marq Piper. I seem to recall besting you at the mêlée during the Hand’s Tourney in King’s Landing.”

Marq remembered the red freak, with his flapping robes and flaming sword… Though he did not recall _this_ man, who looked as though he could hardly lift a sword at all. “And I seem to recall unseating you at the joust,” he replied. The uncertainty wavered in his voice.

Chuckling, Thoros reached up into one of his floppy sleeves and brought out a waterskin. “Come, lad, have a seat by the fire. I imagine your wrists are smarting something fierce. Jack, get those ropes off him and take his sword.” The woman with the missing eye rose, dagger in hand. 

Marq saw his father’s face; remembered the promise he had made. _“No,”_ he said at once. “Not my sword. The ropes… I’ll keep them on. Just leave my sword.” 

Jack looked to Thoros for assurance. 

“... Aye,” said the red priest after a silence. “You heard the lad. The ropes it is.”

Marq sagged with relief. They weren’t going to take Legacy. Suddenly the ropes didn’t hurt as much.

Some logs had been assembled around the pit to serve as makeshift benches, but there was no space left on them for Marq to sit, so instead he made to kneel down in the grass. It was still damp with the morn’s rain, and he felt a cold wetness on his knees as the water soaked through his woollen pants.

Beside Thoros, a boy was scrambling up out of his seat. “Wait, ser, you can have my spot,” he said in a rush.

Marq considered telling him that there was no need… But the boy had already gotten up, the grass was wet, and the log _did_ look flat and dry and comfortable. And so instead he thanked him and settled in next to Thoros, leaning close to the fire to warm his bound hands.

Beside him, Thoros uncorked the waterskin and took a long swig, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “I’ll wager you have a thirst,” he said, offering Marq a sip.

“You wager correctly,” Marq told him. Fumbling due to the ropes around his wrists, he took the skin; brought it to his lips... 

… But when he drank, he found that it was only water.

Thoros must have noticed the look on his face. “Not what you were expecting?” 

Marq handed him back the skin. “I once heard you say that you became a red priest because the robes hid the winestines so well.” Thoros had been as gluttonous a sot as ever lived, plump and smiling… And yet this man was grim-faced and serious, little more than a shadow of his former self.

Thoros turned his head and spat. “Aye, might be I did say that. I was a different man then.”

On the other side of the fire, a young boy was clearing his throat. “Should I give Lord Beric your summons?” He asked politely once Thoros had met his eye.

“Aye,” said the red priest. “Tell him I have need of him, Ned, if you would be so kind.”

The young boy sprang up from his seat, jogged across the clearing, and disappeared into one of the tents, letting the door flap close behind him. 

_Lord Beric,_ Marq thought, frowning. Had he meant the lightning lord, Beric Dondarrion? _No, can’t be._ Beric Dondarrion was long dead; impaled on a lance by the Mountain That Rides. And yet… _What other Beric could he mean?_ Dondarrion had been a close companion to Thoros, but that was long ago. It seemed that many things had changed for the red priest since then, and none of them good. 

Marq looked around the fire, scanning the faces of the other men and women in Thoros’ company. There was a brown-haired man in a frayed yellow cloak; another in grey, with the direwolf of House Stark embroidered on the breast of his gambeson. Standing together was the boy who had given him his seat, along with who appeared to be his sister, a fierce-looking woman with sleek black hair and twin swords sheathed across her back. Jack with the missing eye was turning a dagger over in her hand, watching as the light of the fire glinted off the steel, and beside her were three more men, each dirty and bedraggled, dressed in stained surcoats and rusted mail. _Strange companions for a holy man,_ he thought.

His judgement must have shown on his face, for then Thoros said, “these are my brothers and sisters in arms.” 

_Aye,_ thought Marq with a downward twist of his mouth, remembering the grand introduction Anguy had given him earlier that morning. _‘The brotherhood without banners,’ and ‘the knights of the hollow hill,’ and all the rest of that shit._ “You lead them?” He asked.

“No,” a voice behind him said, and startled, Marq turned around. “I do.” 

A black leather patch covered his right eye, and part of his skull was sunken and marred with half a dozen angry red holes, but still Marq recognized the ruined face of Beric Dondarrion, and the forked purple lightning bolt on the cracked enamel of his breastplate.

His mouth opened, closed, then opened again; Marq was too astonished for words. “My lord… I thought you were dead,” he managed after a silence. “Impaled on a lance by the Mountain.”

Beric’s visible eye blinked. _It is as though he does not recognize me,_ Marq thought, as confused as he was offended. They had met several times. “... Yes,” Beric said finally. “I suppose that’s because I was.” His gaze moved to Thoros, almost like he was uncertain. 

Thoros cleared his throat, spat a glob of phlegm into the dirt, and snuffed it out with a boot. “Aye. That was the first of them.”

“The first of what?” Marq pressed.

Neither Beric nor Thoros answered. “Leave us,” the red priest commanded the others. “We’ll be wanting a word with the lad in private.” His companions withdrew quietly, and then it was only the three of them by the fire pit, silent but for the spit and crackle of the kindling. 

Beric lowered himself onto a log adjacent to their own, where he sat staring into the flames with his remaining eye. With the light of the fire illuminating his face, Marq could see how truly terrible he looked; bony limbs wrapped in ghost-grey skin, his red hair dull and lifeless and brittle. _He looks more corpse than man._

A long moment passed before Thoros finally said, “you were there, weren’t you?”

_He means the Twins,_ Marq knew at once. His neck was so tight that he could scarce manage a nod.

“And you escaped?” 

Another nod. “My lord father helped me, in truth.” Even the words stuck in his throat, as if to choke him. “We fled the Great Hall, and he cut down the men that stood in our way.”

Frowning, Thoros furrowed a brow. “Where is he, then?”

_Dead,_ Marq might have said, _because of me._ Only when he tried to speak, the tightness in his throat became a knot, and he could not bring himself to say the words.

His silence provided answer enough. 

Beric turned away from the flames, a look of staunch conviction on his face. “Join us, and your father’s death will be avenged tenfold,” he promised. 

_Your family,_ a voice inside him said. Marq thought of his lady mother, all silver hair and purple eyes, as gentle and strong as she was beautiful; he thought of his father, the man who had shown him everything he’d ever known, and of Lewys’ breathless laughter and dimpled smile. _Avenge them._ But Maerwynn… 

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to go back. My little sister...”

Beric gave him a sorrowful look. “I am sorry to hear about your father, lad,” he said. “Your sister too. The world is not kind to little girls.”

“My sister is not dead,” Marq snapped.

Beric and Thoros exchanged a look. “You’re certain of it?” Said the red priest. 

He was… Wasn’t he? 

Marq looked down at his hands, forcing to mind what he had seen. _They were leaving before everything began,_ he recalled, _and I didn’t see her when Mother… When she…_

Thinking about it set his throat to tightening all over again. He had wanted to help his mother, he had _wanted_ to, but the arrows were coming down on them like rain, and his father had been shot, and all around them people were screaming and dying, and she was bleeding and her skin was grey, and he had to run, he _had_ to, there was no other choice. _Her fingers were cold._ That was what he remembered most, the coldness of her hand in his. 

“You already know the truth, boy,” said Beric. “Whoever it is you’re looking for, they’re gone — you go back to the Twins, and you die there with them. But...” He leaned forward. “... You join us, and you get your vengeance. You defend the people who _did_ live. The people like you. Do you want that?”

Marq was silent for a long time. _Do not look back,_ a voice inside him said. _You are not going that way._ His eyes were burning, but still he made himself nod. 

“If that is not what you want, lad, tell me now and tell me true,” Beric went on. “You have my word that you may leave here today a free man if that is what you so choose; there is no shame in it. I will cut the binds from your wrists this very moment and have you sent on your way.”

“No,” Marq interrupted. His voice was hoarse. “It is what I want. I want to join you.”

“You will not regret it,” Thoros assured him. “The Lord of Light allowed you to live for a reason, and he’s brought you to us. All is as he has intended.”

It was not the Lord of Light that had allowed him to live, Marq knew. _There were no gods present in the Great Hall that night._ And if there were, a god that permitted such a tragedy to happen was not one worthy of worship.

Beric stood, produced a blade from a sheathe at his hip, and sawed away the ropes binding his hands. _Finally,_ thought Marq, sagging with relief. He had begun to lose feeling in his fingers.

He was still rubbing the soreness from his wrists when Thoros beckoned for the others to return to the fire pit. “Our current outpost is an inn by the crossroads,” the red priest was saying. “There will be a bed and a hot meal waiting for you there when we arrive.”

Marq frowned. “If you’ve an inn, then why are you camped in the woods?”

“We hunt in exchange for our stay,” Thoros explained. “Both for us to have something to eat, and for the innkeep, Masha Heddle, to have something to sell. Oft we leave for days at a time, so we make camp. Hunting is patient work.”

Anguy was grinning one of his freckly grins as he approached. “I must be the soul of patience,” he said, “seeing as I do most of the work.” He gave a mocking half bow.

The man in the frayed yellow cloak snorted. “Aye, and there’s still some of that work to be done,” he said gruffly, “else we’ll be stuck eating stewed rabbits for a week.” That was when Marq noticed the half dozen rabbit corpses he was holding, three to a fist, hanging upside down and limp by their hind legs.

The sight only served to remind Marq of his sister, and of the little white devil that had once been her companion. He looked away, his empty stomach roiling. 

“Up, all of you,” Thoros was saying. “We’re heading downstream. May the Red God be with us, and let us find something on our way to the inn.”

The men turned away and began disassembling the tents. Marq stood to help, and came face-to-face with the boy who had given him his seat earlier. He was short, and had coal-black eyes with hair the same colour, pulled back from his face and knotted behind his head. “I’m Clement,” he said happily. “Clement Flowers.” 

The name sent goose flesh prickling up Marq’s arms beneath his silken sleeves. Clement. That was his lord father’s name… Or it had been, once. “Might I call you Clem instead?” He asked.

“If you like,” Clem said, shrugging. “That’s my sister over there; her name’s Cahira.” He pointed at the fierce-looking woman Marq had seen earlier; the one with the twin swords. “You _are_ joining us, aren’t you?” 

“I am.”

That made Clem smile. “The inn isn’t much, but it’s home,” he told him. “You’ll come to love it, as we did.”

He hoped that was true. “Marq,” he said. “My name is Marq. Of House Piper.” _And I may be all that’s left of it._

Once the men had finished packing up the encampment, they began the trek to the supposed inn. Some were lucky enough to be ahorse, like Thoros, the Stark man, a fair-haired boy that he had come to learn was Ned Dayne, and Marq himself on his mare, but queerly for a leader, Beric travelled afoot. 

Marq slowed his mare, falling back so he could ride alongside Ned and Clem. “Why does your leader walk?” He asked neither in particular. 

“Oh, Lord Beric can’t ride a horse anymore, ser,” Ned, who was all of twelve, said politely. “It took weeks for him to relearn the first time, and it’s only gotten worse since then.”

Marq curled his lip. “The first time?” There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Beric’s legs, but he supposed if the marks on his head said anything…

“What’s your horse’s name?” Clem blurted suddenly. 

Marq shrugged. “She doesn’t have one.”

That seemed to excite Ned. “I could help you come up with one, ser, if it please you; I named Harwin’s horse.” He pointed to the Stark man. “It was easy. I decided to call her Ash, since she’s all grey. Yours is more interesting, though, so it might take longer.” 

What had Maerwynn named her rabbit? Marq tried to remember. _Ser Whiskers, that was it._ He glanced down at the mare. _I suppose that would make you Lady Trots._ Suddenly he felt annoyed. “She doesn’t have a name because I don’t _want_ her to have one,” he told them.

Clem made a face. “But that’s… That’s unkind.”

“Horses deserve names too, ser,” Ned agreed.

Marq’s anger swelled inside of him. “This one doesn’t,” he snapped at them. He thought he glimpsed hurt on the boys’ faces, but he ignored it, spurring his mare ahead. 

The world was not fair, and rarely were the gods just; Marq was no stranger to that truth. And yet, when he hadn’t seen his sister in the Great Hall, some small part of him had thought — hoped… 

… Had he been foolish to think she’d lived? _‘The world is not kind to little girls,’_ Beric had said. But Marq didn’t care what happened to all the other little girls, if it meant that just the one could be safe. 

There was a young stag lapping by the edge of the stream up ahead. Anguy raised a finger to his lips, shushing the group, before nocking an arrow; drawing it back… 

… And just as he was loosing said arrow, Clem cried out somewhere behind them, startling him. Anguy cursed, but still the arrow found its mark, embedding itself into the soft flesh of the stag’s neck. The beast staggered and fell, choking on his own blood. 

Marq turned back to look at Clem, who was now ankle-deep in the stream. “Look,” he said, pointing. “A boat. I think there’s something in it.”

Cahira stepped forward. “Be careful,” she called to her brother.

Clem began to swim. 

“He never listens.” She shook her head, but there was a fond smile on her face. 

Marq knew that feeling all too well. He was in the midst of wondering if he would ever feel it again when Clem gave a sudden scream, and then he was whirling back to face the water, and Cahira was unsheathing one of her swords. “What’s wrong?” Her voice was a shrill shriek of concern. 

Clem never answered. In a hurry, he dragged the boat to shore, then reached inside and from it withdrew a pale, pink shape. 

Marq’s stomach was an everchanging tangle of dread, and each knot was worse than the one before it. Still, he made himself dismount and walk closer, one foot after the other, until finally he was standing at the edge of the stream, overlooking Clem and what was in his arms… Or who.

_Princess Vanya._ The realization weighed heavy in his heart as a stone. She was still garbed in the same pink dress that she had worn when they danced together at the wedding feast, only now it was soiled with blood, red-brown and blotchy. There was more lingering on the rest of her, dried beneath her fingernails and crusted along a cheek; down her neck. Underneath it, her skin was graveworm-white. Marq did not have to touch her to know that she was clammy cold.

To save her dignity, someone had closed her eyes, and petals the same blue shade as her lips were scattered throughout her long dark hair. Marq wondered if it mattered at all; if Vanya knew, wherever she was now. 

She was dead, and by the looks of it, she had been for some time. Not a princess anymore; not even a girl. Just a body. Another corpse.

A cascade of petals tumbled from her hair as Clem waded back to land, falling slow as feathers before landing atop the surface of the water. Once he had made it to the grass, he went to his knees and began to sob. “Please. _Please,_ m’lord, help her…” The tears rolled off his cheeks and landed on Vanya’s still face. “She was so pretty, and she looks so sad. No one deserves to die this way… Please, m’lord.” 

“There’s nothing to be done, boy,” Marq interjected hoarsely. “She’s gone. Has been for some time.” 

“Some time too long,” the red priest agreed solemnly. 

It was Harwin who spoke then. “You claim all that happens is as your Lord of Light intends,” he told Thoros. “Would it not be, then, that her boat passed where we were walking because he _wanted_ us to find her? Because he wanted _you_ to bring her back?” 

_Bring her back,_ Marq thought, frowning. Surely it was not possible… 

_But it makes sense,_ a voice inside him said. Beric’s wounds; him having to relearn how to seat a horse… _Thoros said it was ‘the first of them’ when I asked about the lance and the Mountain,_ he recalled. Had he meant the first death?

“It’s too late to bring her back,” Thoros reiterated, “but I shall cleanse her with our lord’s flame and send her on her way. Bring her into the wood; we’ll be needing to light a fire.” 

That was where Clem laid her down; gently, as though she might break. Some of the other men set to work preparing the fire, but Marq did not move to help. He hardly even saw them. 

There was a loud ripping sound as Thoros tore a length of fabric from his robes. He wrapped it thricefold around the end of a stick before tying it off and handing it to Beric. “Pour some of that spiced rum on it, Harwin,” he commanded as he used his now-free hands to reach up into his sleeves.

Harwin uncorked a leather flask and turned it upside down, pouring the rum onto the cloth-end of the stick until it was sopping wet. The stench of the distilled spirits tickled Marq’s nose.

In the branches overhead, a single bird was singing. Had it been doing that the whole time? He could not remember. 

Beric held the makeshift torch still while Thoros sparked it to life with the same flint and steel he’d used earlier. It went up in flame at once, and then the red priest did the queerest thing: he leaned close to the fire and breathed it into his mouth, almost as though he were drinking it.

Clem scrambled up out of the way. With his mouth shut tight, Thoros knelt in the grass over Vanya’s corpse; pressed his lips to her lifeless blue ones. 

The world seemed to slow. Marq held his breath. Somewhere in the tree above them, the bird was singing, singing, singing. 

And, gods be good… Vanya of House Stark opened her eyes.


End file.
